


From Silence To Melody

by AmbitiousWitch



Category: Doctor Who (2005), The Diary of River Song (Big Finish Audio)
Genre: Alternate Canon, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Canonical Character Death, Depression, Episode Fix-It: s4e09 Forest of the Dead, Episode Rewrite: s07e05 The Angels Take Manhattan, F/M, Grief/Mourning, Heavy Angst, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Mental Time Travel, Non-Linear Narrative, On Hiatus, Peggy Sue Fix-It, Post-Library River Song, Psychological Horror, River Song Pain Train, The Author Regrets Nothing, Too Many Big Finish References, Unreliable Narrator
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-08-17
Updated: 2020-01-24
Packaged: 2020-07-12 12:31:23
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 8
Words: 33,590
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19946221
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AmbitiousWitch/pseuds/AmbitiousWitch
Summary: River Song was ready to finally rest, to move on after her last goodbye. But after a strange twist of luck, she wakes up in the past, years before her death and with a last chance.





	1. Always A Way Out

**Author's Note:**

> This fic is brought to you by courtesy of my insomnia. 
> 
> So, guys, welcome to another canon-divergence. Don't worry my other fic is not going to hiatus and I'm not abandoning it, you're most welcome to yell at me if I do.
> 
> This idea was half me daydreaming while scrolling in old arse Peggy Sue fics that I have from my bookmarks in the HP fandom and because of a lovely comment that [goddessdel](https://archiveofourown.org/users/goddessdel/pseuds/Del) left in one of my gifsets. Which was lovely and also kick-started another plot bunny that jumped in my brain until I groaned and decided that I better get it out of my head so I can continue with my other overly long fics and my novel.
> 
> For anyone who is too young or never ventured to read old fics like I do: [here is a link to the main page where it's explained. Not to be confused with Mary Sue, by the way.](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PeggySue%22) I haven't seen many on this fandom but I guess it's because DW has already time travel and mental time travel is never mentioned in "canon." 
> 
> And finally same routine with my other canon divergences:
> 
>   * Lots of Big Finish references (sorry, but don't worry I will leave links in the footnotes 
>   * Darillium happened with Eleven. No THORS because I say so.
>   * No [I Love You Stigma](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheILoveYouStigma) because I hate that trope, to be honest. One season is okay, seven is just too much.
>   * From now, I will publish "behind the scenes" of every chapter, which is mostly just glorified author's notes to get the thoughts out of my head, mostly because I want to use the endnotes of every chapter for footnotes and formatting footnotes in this site is a pain. So, I will let the link for the "bts" in my blog down here.
> Thanks to my amazing beta, [Whovianlord.](https://archiveofourown.org/users/whovianlord) Enjoy! Comments are appreciated.


**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Charlotte sighs, “Just think about it, River. I know that you don’t like being here anymore. And even if we fail, what do you have to lose?”
> 
>  _What? Maybe that I could destroy the entire of creation… Again._ River shallows that bitter thought. It’s horrible, it will never stop being horrible that the balance of time depends on her dying.
> 
>  _Or maybe not,_ that stubborn part of her mind says. _Maybe I don’t have to this time. I have the spoiler, I know what will happen. Maybe it doesn’t have to be me. I have done it before. Why should it be different?_
> 
> What do I have to lose?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **Music for this chapter:** [_Juliet's Dream_](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0-ZuL4jcVmk) from _Romeo and Juliet (2013)._

River knows that there is no real wind in the Library’s database nor a real sun, but for the sake of nostalgia, she still closes her eyes at the rays warming her skin. It feels real for her, in a way. 

There is a strange calm feeling that surrounds her. After all the years of bitterness, all the years of forgetting and remembering again, she always comes back to the simple truth: she was dead and had become a data ghost - a freak of technology. 

She had, of course, found a way to eventually escape. She became Madame Vastra’s consultant, at first, just to see someone outside her team and CAL, then to check on The Doctor. 

Well, checking had been first, then it had been hunting - if there wasn’t a better word to describe what she had started doing after her husband didn’t answer her. She had kicked him around, slapped him and saw her own hand going through his pale face. 

“I know what happened with my parents hit you hard, sweetie, but you can’t keep doing this,” River would say every day after watching him alone in the dark, infinitely deep into the TARDIS. “I’m serious, Doctor. Vastra is right, you can’t keep doing this. This is not who you are.” 

All her words were just met with silence, with blank looks to the walls or days working in the workshop on things that didn’t need fixing. River took offence during the first year, disappearing for months out of anger, travelling through the database, talking to Vastra, and going to archaeological expeditions in a world that didn’t need them. 

When she had come back, The Doctor was still in London, still confined to the TARDIS to such a point that his own friends were starting to worry. Vastra had commented about it to River in one of their talks while they both were trying to solve a case involving an alien that seemed to be kidnapping patients from Bedlam. 

“Oh, don’t you worry about it,” River had said, a bitter smile on her lips. “He always does this, has his periods of brooding. I’m sure that when you give him an interesting case or some poor human appears around the TARDIS’s way, you will have him back.”

“If you say so, Professor, we’re just worried. The TARDIS is still there but he doesn’t answer any calls.”

“Maybe he is in one of the areas where there is no phone. Don’t worry, I will tell him to pick up.” 

Oh, and she had. She had appeared in the TARDIS as furious as any poltergeist in a horror story. The TARDIS could hear her and the Cloister bells rang as furious as her voice.

He was in the Library that day. She hadn’t seen him in two years and he looked paler and thinner than before, but with the same dead look in his eyes. He had no right looking like that, he had no right to close himself to the universe that still needed him. River was dead, she was the one that had died and yet the anger building inside her seemed to disagree. 

“How dare you?” River hissed, planting herself behind him. “How dare you throw out your life like this? Where are you, hmm? How many years have passed since Manhattan? Ten? A hundred? It doesn’t matter, _I’m_ out there, Doctor. I’m sure that I am. And the universe needs you, you can’t stay and waste away for them.

“You think I didn’t love them? Do you want to hear that you were right? That it mattered, that it destroyed me? Well, it did, but that was before, Doctor, it was before they were taken. It was when they just acted like they had dreamt they had a child. I mourned them long before Manhattan and I moved on and so should you!” 

He didn’t reply or turn around, never gazed away from the book he was reading and River just grew angrier. 

“Look at me!” she screamed. “Look at me, you bastard! _You_ did this! You saved me in that database, you knew that this would happen. You wanted this, so _speak_ to me!”

He got up abruptly after that, startling her, the book he had been reading thrown away the other side of the room. River stared at him, surprised at the sudden violent act, but The Doctor didn’t look at her, didn’t talk. He just removed Amy’s glasses from his face and covered it with his hand. For some minutes, River had thought that he would finally start to acknowledge her, but the Doctor just sat down again, breathing heavily and covering his face with his hands. 

River had stood there for a few minutes, watching him, both sad and mortified. “I knew it would be my end, you know,” she had choked out. “I knew I had to do it because otherwise, neither of us would have had a chance. But all these years I thought… I thought that you made that screwdriver because you wanted to say goodbye. This you. I guess I was mistaken.” 

That night had been the one that she had just given up on him replying and talking to him had just become a reflex every time she visited him, which became fewer and fewer. 

She hadn't noticed, in all those years in London, that he had done Darillium already, River had assumed he still hadn’t done it by that time, after all, she had seen him in the purple coat that he was using after London back then. How could she know it had been after the Towers? After all, Vastra had seemed aware that River was dead.

“She is dead, I’m afraid, she’s been dead for a very long time.” Those words shouldn’t have stung as they had, but they did. Maybe because they were the truth, she had been dead since the day he had met her.

It had taken The Doctor behaving like The Doctor for River to snap again. Clara Oswald had just sacrificed her life to save him and there he went ready with an equally dangerous plan to save her.

River smiles at the memory, at her own gasp of surprise when his hand caught her wrist — as if she could still breathe — his lips found hers and his hands cupped her face. 

She doesn’t know if it was the relief that he was listening to her finally or the fact he could touch her that had made her smile, but she had. And at that moment, she felt like she had seen him clearly for the first time. No lies, no turned faces, no spoilers. He said it would hurt too much and River believed him, something that never happened when she was alive. 

But still, she had to ask for her goodbye because, even when he was right, they both had to move on. River had been the one in tears this time, the one that didn’t want it to end. _If you ever loved me, say it like you’re going to come back._

“It was a kind lie,” she said out loud. “River and The Doctor, running forever.” Her eyes closed, feeling the sun one last time. “But now is the time to sleep.”

She closes her eyes.

“Wait!” River opens her eyes at the scream, CAL is running to her. “River, wait!” 

“CAL— “

“Is it true?” The girl cuts her. “Are you fading? Are you leaving?”

River takes a deep breath and kneels to the girl's height. “Yes, it’s my time, CAL. I’ll miss you.” 

“No, you can’t,” the girl says, panicking. “Listen, River, I need to tell you something. I had a dream, a memory. And Doctor Moon said it was nothing, just a glitch. But you were there! And your husband— “

“What do you mean a memory? My memories?” River’s voice grows stern. “Charlotte Lux, have you been picking in other people’s memories again? I already told you it’s ru— ”

“River, I can take you out of the mainframe!” CAL snaps and the older woman looks at her like she had slapped her.

“Wh— What?” 

“I had a dream,” CAL begins again, her face turning serious, “Doctor Moon said that it was just my data crossing with yours but it was not. I was not looking into your memories. I was another person and I jumped and then was _everywhere_.”

River falls on her knees and puts her hands over the little girl’s shoulders. How is it possible? A half-laugh, half-sob escapes from her lips. Of course, the Impossible Girl and River Song, hadn’t she told The Doctor that they were linked? 

“Oh, sweetheart,” River says cupping Charlotte’s little face. She looks different than Clara, would she have looked like her, if she had had the opportunity to grow up? “Charlotte, I know you want to help but my body was burnt, remember? I can’t— I can’t come back.”

“You can,” CAL insists firmly. “River, you have been travelling, haven’t you? Through time, to other people’s dreams? What if I can transfer these neuro waves, this you, to your body before you died?”

“That’s ridiculous,” River mutters, feeling a sudden and unwanted sensation in her chest. _Hope? Oh, c’ mon now._ “That is impossible, something like that it’s— It’s just bizarre.”

“Since when you, of all people, stopped believing in the impossible?” CAL says. “And besides, you have done it before, you told me about that android that you transferred your memories into to defeat those Devils!”[1]

“I should have never told you that story,” River grits outs but then sighs. “Charlotte, even if you succeed, you would have to kill my old self to do it. If this is possible, my conscience would replace her.”

“And? You’re still River Song.”

 _Am I?_ The question creeps on her mind. _I’m I still River Song? That River Song that cheated death so many times until she didn’t? Or am I just a ghost?_

“Even if I do it, Charlotte,” River’s voice is low. “Even if I go back. My death. My death is a fixed point. Everything I did, everything that I am, eventually led me here. To the Library. And if I change that, if I don’t die. If I don’t save the Doctor if he doesn’t watch me die… Then what will happen? I would probably cease to exist.” 

“You were ready to make that decision minutes ago.” River looks at the girl between offended and hurt. _God, that it’s easy to forget that she is a supercomputer._ “Think about it, River, you can go back with this knowledge. With the knowledge of what will happen. You have told me how many times you have changed things in the past so you can rewrite them in the present. Why would this be different?”

“Because there are rules! And paradoxes, probably hundreds of them around my life. One over another and— “ River cuts herself and barks laugh. _Oh, dear, I am really sounding like the Doctor now. Since when I cared about the rules like that?_

Charlotte sighs, “Just think about it, River. I know that you don’t like being here anymore. And even if we fail, what do you have to lose?”

 _What? Maybe that I could destroy the entire of creation… Again._ River shallows that bitter thought. It’s horrible, it will never stop being horrible that the balance of time depends on her dying.

 _Or maybe not,_ that stubborn part of her mind says. _Maybe I don’t have to this time. I have the spoiler, I know what will happen. Maybe it doesn’t have to be me. I have done it before. Why should it be different?_

_What do I have to lose?_

“There is always a way out,” she murmurs and passes a hand through her curls, then she turns to CAL. “Alright, Charlotte, what do I have to do?” 

“Just tell me a place and a moment in time in which you were unconscious and your brain connected to a machine. Like, a coma or a surgery.” River massages her temples for a moment. Computers, always so specific. “I’m sorry, I know it’s complicated.”

“I have it,” River says, her voice flat at the sudden anger of remembering herself helpless. “It’s not ideal, but if I got out once I can do it again. Maybe quicker this time, since I know what happened.” 

“Let’s do it, then.” 

River kneels again and puts her hand on CAL’s temple. The memory flowing through them. “Goodbye, River.”

“Thank you, Charlotte.”

The first breath that River takes is accompanied by the sensation of choking. She opens her eyes, her forehead touching the glass of the cloning chamber while she struggles for breath. Real breath, after all these years… 

_I’m alive,_ she thinks and chokes a sob. _I’m alive._

Her body hurts for the uncomfortable position and the electrodes and harness keeping her in the machine. But River welcomes the real sensation after years of fake ones. She smiles as she kicks the chamber’s door with all her strength. 

Now she has another escape to do.[2]

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1\. The Discordia, who were River's arc villains during series 4 of _The Diary of River Song_ often took the form of Devils. The event that Charlotte is referring is from the second episode of the series [_Kings of Infinite Space_](https://tardis.fandom.com/wiki/Kings_of_Infinite_Space_\(audio_story\)) where River tricked a Discordia captain by putting an android in her place before he could kill her.[return to text]  
> 2\. The clone chamber is from series 1, episode 3, [_Signs._](https://tardis.fandom.com/wiki/Signs_\(audio_story\)) [return to text]
> 
> [Chapter's BTS/Glorified Author's Note.](https://ambitious-witch.tumblr.com/post/187067107058/from-silence-to-melody-bts)


	2. Everybody Lives

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It’s funny how reality shocks you after you’ve spent years trapped in a fake world.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello, people, thank you so much for the enthusiastic reception to this story. This chapter was a challenge to write because I had to make some modifications to the outline. 
> 
> There have been some changes in the tags and the rating. Please mind the tags always.
> 
>  **Timeline note:** For story proposes and because I don't trust in the TARDIS wikia with timelines so much. I am putting series 1 from _The Diary of River Song_ before Manhattan. The version of Eleven that appears in this chapter is some weeks into his retirement time in London and after Darillium. 
> 
> **Music for this chapter:** [_Einar Returns Home_ from The Danish Girl](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-lqi7MU4icQ) and [_First Snow_ from _The Fauntain_](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IYfdY4Sl-EQ).
> 
> Thanks to my beta Whovianlord. 
> 
> Comments are appreciated!

River’s muscles ache when she gets out of the cloning chamber. How long had she been trapped there the first time? Probably a month, if not more. All those clones of her, weaker but somehow still her. Her mind piloting while that creature that pretended to be The Doctor used her to do the dirty work.

_Oh, I’m going to enjoy killing that son of a bitch again._

She stands up seeing the clone on the other side of the chamber, a chill running down her spine just like the first time. Oh, how quickly she had fallen for that trick back then, when she believed that The Doctor had more faces thanks to her. She looks down at the clone’s face already stabilizing, the Flesh forming copying her looks and probably already having her memories.

River opens the chamber and presses the bottom of the console, taking a deep breath when she finally finds the setting that will dissolve the clone. She gives the poor thing the dignity of a glance as she dissolves. She searches for her gun and then enters the chamber again. Waiting for her kidnapper to come and fetch her.

She does what she did last time, pretending to be asleep, but this time she doesn’t talk or pretend that she doesn’t know what is happening. Why argue with a dead creature?

"Relax, my love, take it easy. You've been asleep," the Kamishi says when she pretends to wake up.

"Oh, yes, I'm sorry," River says, the tiredness in her voice only half fake. She had been asleep, yes, for centuries.

"Don't apologize, my love, you need more rest these days, that's all." River resists the impulse of rolling her eyes. She gets up off the bed and narrows her eyes to the impostor.

“I’m feeling much better, actually.”

“I’m - I’m very happy to hear.” River snorts at his poor attempt to maintain the charade, but she sees that he is already pressing the clicker that he had used to dissolve the clones every time they discovered him. That just makes her angrier.

 _Oh, to hell with this._ She pulls out her gun and the Kamishi flips and keeps pressing the clicker. “Forget it, it’s not going to work. I’m not one of your clones.”

“Oh,” he says and River wants to laugh again.

“You know, I actually thought that I could do this like the first time…”

“Wh - What?”

“... But then I thought: ‘Oh, well, he’ll be dead, it can be our little secret.”

“My dear, I don’t think you have the full picture— “

“Oh, I have the full picture,” River says gripping the gun, her voice tight with emotion. “I have the full picture for the first time in my long life. But I thank you, if it wasn’t for your machine, I wouldn’t have been able to get out in time.”

“I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about, River, but if you just listen— “

“Shut up,” River hisses. “Show me your real face.”

“This _is_ my real face.”

“You’re a Kamishi, so that I doubt,” River says and the creature helps, his fake face alarmed. ”And actually, I prefer to kill things more than people, I’m funny like that.”

The creature obeys and River can’t help the little laugh that escapes from her lips just like the first time. The same amount of bullets puts him down.

The alarms on the ship go off.[1]

* * *

It’s funny how reality shocks you after you’ve spent years trapped in a fake world.

Everything that River does after landing the _Sarah Jane_ feels exactly like what she did daily while living in the Library database: quick, methodical. Just getting to the next step in the mission.

She puts herself in the robo-waitress suit.

She plays the role of Miss Spritz again, to save the Doctor from the Rulers’ schemes.

She tricks Bertie and looks at her husband’s eighth face one last time.[2]

And at the end, she is walking in a crowd, in a colony, after having done everything so automatically, when it hits her again, like a wave: the faces around being different and not the same pattern, the smell of the fuels of the ships, the heat of the crowd, the _noise_.

And time...

Time stops. Completely. It hadn’t done that before, had it? It was all the Library, that quick thinking and no real smell, not real heat. Not even her heartbeats had been—

“Hey!” somebody cries when she crashes against them. River keeps walking, her head pounding.

God, she had forgotten, she had gotten so used to it, to a world without time, without smell, without real life. River stumbles away from the crowd. There was a park in this city… wasn’t there? She can’t recall. All the faces are different here, they don’t just pass, they notice her. Once she had people that knew her. Her team. Anita, the Daves, Miss Evangelista. But with time they have all moved on, faded.

And at the end, it was just her, CAL, Doctor Moon, and the crowds with identical faces.

River runs a hand over her face and through her hair, waiting for the overload to stop. She hopes she didn’t scream, had she screamed? Why didn’t it hit her when she was in the _Sarah Jane_ or with the Rulers?

 _I already did that,_ she thinks, answering her own question. _I did again like a memory. How many times did I do it back in the Library?_

A hand is over her shoulder. “River?”

She lifts her head to the voice. She is in that park, sitting on a bench and The Doctor is squatting in front of her. Her Doctor, not the young one that she had just saved. He is looking at her, concerned.

“What are you doing here?” River tries to sound casual but her voice trembles. She can’t let him know what she did, not yet.

“You sent me a message on the psychic paper,” the Doctor says, pulling one of her curls away from her face.

“I didn’t.”

“Well then, spoilers,” he smiles, but River just looks at him up and down, checking his attire to see which time he’s from. “Where are you, dear?”

“The Sanukuma and the Rulers of the Universe,” River replies automatically. _No bowtie. Dark coat. He has done Darillium._ “You did it but you probably can’t remember, sweetie. It was your eighth face.”

“Oh, that one,” the Doctor scoffs. “I always wonder how I survived such a long time in that body with all that brain damage. Are you okay? Are you hurt?”

River forces a smile. “I am perfect, sweetie, you’re the one that I had to rescue, remember?”

Her husband gives a serious glare. “No, I don’t, but you are very pale. C’mon, I will give you a lift to Luna.”

“I’ll use my vortex manipulator, Doctor, it’s not necessary,” River gets up but her legs wobble and she mentally curses this young body. The Doctor raises a brow to her, deadpan, and she sighs. What can she do? Tell him ‘I am sorry, sweetie, I just got sensory overload from living as a cybernetic entity for six hundred years’? No, she can’t, and she can’t let him accidentally read that from her mind either.

She should leave, she should leave and plan what she is going to do. This is her last chance.

But she doesn’t, instead, she lets him take her to the TARDIS, her head falling over his shoulder. Her second mother welcomes her with a hum. Does she know what River had done? Probably. Though River wonders why the time machine is not arching because of the paradox that must exist.

_Hello, Old Girl, did you miss me? Did he miss me?_

“I think you should eat something and rest, River,” The Doctor says turning his back at her for the console. “I can give you a lift to Luna or wherever you were working.”

The weird business-like tone in his voice makes River feel a knot in her throat. _I am dead from his point of view by this time. No. Not just this time, I have always been dead. He just has stopped hoping there is a way to escape it._ Is her past self — the ghost — already lingering here? Maybe, maybe not.

“I actually was thinking about staying here a while, and visit my parents after that,” River blurts out and the Doctor tenses. “Unless there are spoilers in between? You never told me where you were, sweetie.”

“I’m way past, River, don’t worry,” he says, ”I arrived in Victorian London about a week ago, Vastra and Jenny needed help with some cases. Rubbish cases, mostly.”

River tries to not snort at the obvious lie, at the fake enthusiasm, she knows what he is thinking: she is young, so he has to put on a show. And he is, but it’s like he is one of those old Victorian automatons, moving around forcefully with the last of his strength.

She thinks on just leaving here since, in theory, she shouldn't be here by this date, but the memory all of those years she did walk away to his turned back just thinking it was rejection run through her mind and she can't bear it. Not today.

"Doctor, look at me."

He turns around, not trying the fake smile again, but staring at her up and down as if searching for a wound she would be hiding. River keeps her eyes on his and thinks how many times she was actually injured and how many times that ended in a fight or hours of silence, especially after her parents had died. Slowly, like she is approaching some young and distrustful animal and not the man she had been married for over a century, she puts her arms around him and rests her face in the crook of his neck.

The Doctor doesn't move at first which surprises her. He’s always the one to go around for hugs and forehead kisses. With her, with his companions, with strangers. When his arms finally circle around her, it’s almost as if he is testing if she is solid. _Who knows, maybe that's not unreasonable._

"I missed you," River says holding him tighter and trying to silence those thoughts.

"Did they hurt you?" He asks again, his voice dropping low. "You know you can tell me, River. I was there, even if the memory is fuzzy."

"There was nothing I didn't do before, Doctor," she murmurs but doesn't open her eyes. "A little kidnapping over her and little cloning over there. Almost standard since I was a baby."

" _River_."

"Come to bed with me," she says, trying to hold the tremble of her voice. Shecan't let him ask questions now. "When was the last time you slept, sweetie? Because you do look terrible."

"Don’t change the subject," The Doctor says sternly putting his hands over her shoulders and forcing her to look at him.

“I just… I don’t want to talk about it, Doctor, alright? Not now.” _Not when my head is still spinning and can’t hold well to my cover story._ “Besides, you just said I needed to rest.”

The Doctor sighs at her cheeky smile and River knows she has won. She plants a little peck on his lips and leaves him to go to take a shower, letting out a sigh too when she knows she is out of his reach. She takes off her pantsuit and blouse, staring at her own reflection in the mirror. It really is her body, her body of back then, back when she was barely in the first decades of her professoriate. There are scars from future fights that are missing, some gray hairs that are still to grow and that she remembers covering with some reddish-gold dye, some wrinkles that are still to appear. But she is here, she really is here.

A shiver runs down her spine when she steps into the shower, but she quickly relaxes. This is good, that she can feel it, that it’s real. It means that it’s not just her wishful thinking, it means that it’s not one of the tricks of the mainframe.

River thinks of where she is, what is she going to do. She had told The Doctor that she was going to visit her parents and that makes her think that he would probably let her in Leadworth, that she will see her parents again after all these years…

She takes a deep breath. Well, it was one of the risks, she knew that CAL would send her before Manhattan. She has to bear it, just like she will have to bear the Library again if she fails.

 _Idiot, don’t think about failing now,_ she chastises herself.

The Doctor is already in their room when River finishes, actually wearing pyjamas, much to her surprise and amusement. She is quite sure that she can count the few moments she actually saw him sleep on one hand. He has Amy’s glasses on and seems to be reading a big book in quantum physics.

“Are you trying to fall asleep quicker?” River jokes while searching for one of her nightgowns in the closet.

"You know I don't need more than two hours of sleep."

"I also know that you read quicker than that.”

The Doctor doesn't raise his eyes off the book until River is already in her side of the bed. The Doctor takes off the glasses and gives her a small smile.

"One learns to take things slow when the moments are unique," he says. River can read the hidden meaning of those words on his eyes. But for the sake of spoilers, she still gives him a teasing smile.

"Doctor, you're incapable of taking things slow."

He scoffs, rolling his eyes. "I thought you were going to rest."

"I asked you to get sleep too."

The Doctor sighs and leaves the book in his nightstand. Switching off the light and getting more under the covers. River snuggles against him, resting her head on his chest. Even if for a few moments she doesn’t believe in the beating of her own hearts, she knows that his are not something that a program can fake.

* * *

_She is running down a corridor again. Like on that immense ship, the_ Sarah Jane.

_No._

_No, it is the_ Sarah Jane! _How has she got here again? She had escaped. Twice!_

_"Help! Help me, please!"_

_Again it's the voice. The voice of the other dreams…_

_Except that she knows that those weren't dreams but the clones' memories. And that it was her, the original, who was screaming for help._

_She opens the door this time and runs to the cloning chamber. Her own face inside it is twisted with fear. River opens the chamber, but instead of being relieved, her other self grabs her wrist in a brushing grip._

_"You selfish shit," the other River hisses._

_"Let me go!"_

_"Why should I? You took my body. You erased me."_

_"It's_ my _body!" River says and the original smiles._

_"Not, it's not, you're not me. You're a ghost. A freak. What will happen when he finds out? When Amy and Rory find out—"_

_"That her daughter is dead again?" A child's voice says in the corner. Melody Pond's face, pale and thin, she glares at her with Amy's eyes. "Wouldn't be the first time, would it?"_

_"Stop it."_

_"I always knew that you wouldn't add to all those good girl rules so easily," a younger woman's voice says and she comes from the dark of the room, smiling. "Besides, what it's a little universe-ending paradox once in a while?"_

_"Brooke?" River mutters to the woman's voice._

_"How quickly do you forget your faces, River Song?" Mels says her name with a mocking tune. "It's not impossible, though: all those years in the Library. You should have forgotten who you were."_

_"Stop!"_

_"You should have faded!" The River in the chamber hisses. And suddenly they are no longer in the Sarah Jane, but in the Library. And River is again in the space suit, her head crowned with that horrible diadem to the mainframe._

_AUTODESTRUCTION IN TEN…_

_"What are you going to do when the angels come, ghost?" the little girl says. "Are you going to let them grow old in the Great Depression? Away from their families? Their real families? Do you think that because you told them to write a note, they are like you?"_

_"No, no! Get me out!"_

_"You can't run," Mels says. "You can't change it without killing everyone in the process. You can't avoid it without getting some of yourself killed. Foreknowledge is dangerous. Are you ready to do that again, River Song?"_

_FIVE…_

_"Please!"_

_"She is," the other River says but her voice sounds raspy and her face turns older, with an eyepatch. "After all, you’re always a psychopath, aren't you? Maybe this time, your failure will end with The Doctor for good."_

_TWO..._

_"No!" she screams but her voice sounds hoarse. "I won't fail. I can't fail."_

_The other River smiles, a sinister smile that creeps inside her heart. "Spoilers."_

_ONE._

I won't fail, _River thinks as she closes her eyes, tears running down her face._

_She burns anyway._

* * *

She wakes up choking.

"River! River, it's okay. Breathe. You're in the TARDIS." River shakes her head, gasping for air when the light of the room turns on. _It was a dream_ , she tells herself as the Doctor gets her hair out of her face. _It was a dream, I wasn’t— I am not burning._

_But I did. I did burn. I died._

“River?” The Doctor asks, worried, but River shakes her head again and sits on the edge of the bed running a hand over her face. The dream and the voices, her voices, still screaming in her mind.

_Ghost._

Is that everything she is now? Everything she has been over those centuries? Did the real River Song die in that hellish chair? Is she just… What? A sliver of energy inside a screwdriver?

 _No,_ she thinks and her nails bury on her palms. _I survived, all those years, I didn’t forget. They all did, they all faded eventually. I am River Song. I am real,_ this _is real._

River feels the Doctor’s hand brushing her arm. “Please, tell me what’s going on, River. I’m not asking you for a spoiler, I just want to know that you’re okay.”

She lets out a trembling laugh. Okay? How she be okay? No, she is not okay. She is _perfect_ , because she is alive. But she is also terrified because everything around feels strange, alien, after all the years. It felt first like reviving a memory, safe, unchanging. Now, she is changing it, she changing everything, she shouldn’t be here.

“Spoilers.” The word had been a blessing and a curse so many times, now it’s the only thing that keeps her from breaking down. River snorts again and turns around to his worried expression. River guesses that now she knows what it is, carrying with the knowledge of her death on her back.

The Doctor opens his mouth to protest but she smashes her lips against his. On a younger him that would have surprised him _and_ shut him up. But this Doctor just kisses her back, desperately, holding her face like he had that last time. But instead of a deep, longing kiss, this one is all tongue and teeth and his hands hold River like she could fade at any moment.

She lets him and responds with equal enthusiasm, tugging the buttons of his shirt but suddenly The Doctor pulls away, his face painted again with concern. It's River who grabs his face this time.

"Don't ask," she mumbles against his lips. "Please, don't ask now. It’s not something they did to me. It's something that is happening." She rests her forehead against his. "Something I can't tell you. But you will know, in the future. So, please, my love, don't ask me. Just kiss me. Let's forget about it, the nightmares, the spoilers. Let’s leave it for the next time."

River sees the sorrow flashing over his face before he starts kissing her again without a word. She doesn't have to read his mind to know what he is thinking. That there are no more spoilers for him. That this is a younger her, still ignorant of how their story will end and begin.

She gets him out of his shirt, leaving kisses over his neck and chest as a silent consolation. Wanting to tell him that it's not the last time, no if she gets it right. River gasps when he takes one of her breasts through the fabric of her nightgown and helps him take it off too.

Moments like these weren't strange in the Library. The first years, when she could still count them. CAL would use her memories to project an image of her Doctor in the little house they both shared.

But CAL couldn't simulate the pleasure running down her spine when his lips run down her body. Or the way his hands grip her hips when River climbs into his lap and sinks down onto him. In those memories, everything was just a balm, a dream that in a child's mind was supposed to keep her happy. And they were perfect in a way, too perfect. That's why she told Charlotte to stop doing it.

But she guesses that it was this imperfection that could never be imitated. Of them. Of what they had lived. The way that his old eyes look at her with that mix of love and deep sadness while they rock together. River wants to treasure those eyes for the days to come, she knows that she will have to keep some things intact and that means being away from her husband for long a time. She loves all his faces. But those other eleven pairs of eyes can look at her with fear, fascination or even attraction but never love, not yet, not like this one.

The Doctor cradles her head with one hand and kisses her cheek and her lips, River moans against his mouth, burying her hands on his hair and grinds down hard against him to meet his thrusts.

They move against each other desperately, clinging to each other like it’s the last time they will ever touch the other; and soon River comes with a muffled cry against his shoulder. The Doctor holds her as she trembles thrusting a few times as he follows and comes with a groan.

They stay close for a moment, River opens her eyes and plants a small kiss on his cheek, The Doctor just looks at her, brushing his fingers against her face and giving her a very small but actually real smile.

River smiles back and presses her forehead against his. No. No program, no computer, nor illusion could be more real than this.

“Sleep,” He says a few hours later as they are still lying down in bed. “Stop thinking.”

“Don’t pick,” River pinches his shoulder, trying to hide the sudden alarm that he had heard something.

“I’m not picking, you’re turning around. What are you thinking?”

“Don’t read my mind.”

“I am not. I’m asking you, silly.”

River thinks on her nightmare, on the things that her other faces said. What is she going to do when the angels come? What is she going to do when it’s her turn to die again? She can’t avoid it, but she has to escape.

And she doesn’t have to be only one.

“River?”

“That I have a work to do soon, that might help some people,” she says carefully, “and if I fail, I might die and take them with me.”

“Do you plan to fail?” The Doctor asks quietly. “If you do, sometimes you can’t save everyone. You told me that many times.”

“Oh, I won’t fail this time, my love, that I assure you,” she smiles against his back. “This time, everybody lives.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This scene happened almost the same way in _Signs_ , albeit here I obviously changed some dialogue.[return to text]  
> The events that River is describing are from the last story of series 1 of _The Diary of River Song_ , _The Rulers of the Universe_.[return to text]
> 
> Just be sure, guys: next chapters are going to have some unpopular interpretations about the Ponds and their relationship with River. Mostly of which contradicts the common fanon around them, and exploring different interpretations that the different writers both in the show and Big Finish offered. Mostly because some things in I listened in _The Furies_ and sadly thanks to a certain writer in series 7A that seemed to forget that River... existed, on his Pond-centric episodes. If you are really sensitive about them not being perfect fluffy parents or believe that everything bad that has happened in River's life should just be blamed on Eleven. I truly suggest stopping reading after this chapter. After all, I'm just a fanfic writer like any everyone and my opinion is not more or less than any other, but I don't wanna get hate because I didn't adhere myself to a single interpretation.  
> [Behind the scenes/glorified author's note.](https://ambitious-witch.tumblr.com/post/187759322898/from-silence-to-melody-bts)


	3. Manhattan

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much, guys, for this amazing response, I was expecting everyone running away after the last chapter. But here we are! And I have a lot of... Feelings about series 7A, not many of them... Good. Okay, most of them bad, but that's the fun on rewriting, I guess, and you will see all my yelling in the bts, which this time I actually advise to read in case you want to kill me by when you finish reading XD
> 
>  **Music for this chapter:** [_Everyone Likes Oranges_](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vPFBCJ1T6OU) from _Penny Dreadful_. [_Ghost I_](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SptVWasGGIA&list=PLzhk329J-YhLv9vVARIu5njKbE6Y3Syjj&index=9&t=0s) and [_Return To Your Ghost_](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AxPA2AHSes8&list=PLzhk329J-YhLv9vVARIu5njKbE6Y3Syjj&index=13&t=0s) from _Crimson Peak._
> 
> Thanks to my beta, Whovianlord.

* * *

_Everyone says that if you have a second chance, if you know the future, then things will be easier. An old friend taught me the contrary since I was very young. Knowing your own future is dangerous. But, when you have actually lived that future, when you have actually cried those tears, seen the people you love just go, and this second chance is a real one, then what can you do? Leave them to die while you save yourself?_

* * *

River watches her parents’ house from the threshold of the TARDIS’ door. She can scarcely remember the last time she had been there. She remembers the first time she had planned to come back after finding her siblings. For some reason, she wanted to tell them that she had found more family out there, but she had backed down at the last minute, not wanting to burden her parents with another reminder of what they lost. [1]

“Something wrong?” The Doctor asks from the console. “I made sure that there weren’t any past versions of us on this date.”

“Don’t you want to come with me, sweetie?” River mentally scolds herself for suggesting it. The Doctor doesn’t look at her, but she can see his hands grabbing the controls of the console.

“No, I have things to do in London, maybe next time, dear.” _Liar_ , River thinks but sighs immediately because there is nothing she can do. He is as stubborn as her, that’s something they both know. “See you around, Professor River Song.”

“‘Till next time, Doctor,” River gives him her best smile before turning around. _Wait for me, sweetie. Please. I will fix everything._

River hears voices at the moment she gets close to the house with the blue door and is relieved that she didn’t just appear in the garden like she used to do when she was younger.

“Rory, please don’t show my mother those photographs,” her mother says when she opens the door, her face turns white with surprise for a moment before smiling. “River.”

“Hello, Mother,” River prays that her voice doesn’t sound as strangled as she feels it is. Amy blinks for a moment and moves from the threshold to let her in, River leans and plants a kiss on her cheek.

“Aunt Sharon and our parents are here,” Amy says smiling. “Are you looking for The Doctor? Because he left about a week ago, said he was going to see you.”

“I came to visit you, actually,” River knows where The Doctor is and smiles fondly at the memory.

“Oh. Right. Okay.” Amy smiles awkwardly. “Then go ahead, they are in the garden. Rory is showing them some photographs of our travels and he seems _determined_ on showing the ones where I look the worst.” She raises her voice to the garden and laughs come from it.

Her father, great-aunt and grandparents are passing around a photo album and laughing. Tabetha Pond is the first to react and Rory turns around first freezing and then getting up from his seat.

“I hope I didn’t interrupt,” River says smiling, walking to her father and giving him a kiss on the cheek.

“Huh, no, of course not,” Rory says. “Dad, Tabitha, Augustus, I’m sure you remember Professor Song. Sharon, I don’t know if you were introduced…”

“We were.” Aunt Sharon cuts him off, staring at River with a dry smile. “You didn’t bring your husband with you, did you?”

“Sharon, don’t be rude,” Tabetha chastises her sister.

“Don’t worry, Mrs Pond,” River says. “No, he is not with me, I just wanted to drop by to see how Amy and Rory are doing.”

Her grandfathers greet her with more courtesy and moments like these are the ones when River thanks that she is used to calling them Mr Pond and Mr Williams from her childhood. Even though they only know this face as Professor Song, she always wonders if they ever see the wild little girl that grew up in a home and came to do sleepovers with their children. Aunt Sharon certainly seems to keep her past dislike for Mels and River Song pretty even.

Even when Amy comes back and she accepts the lunch, River doesn’t talk much while being around her family. She just observes them, trying to remember the last time she had seen them so happy. Brian talks about his travels, how he picked it up from their adventures with The Doctor. They all laugh, talk about life, and River can’t stop thinking about that dream that she had weeks ago: Melody’s words about how the angels will take everything off them.

Her mother grew up all her life with a neglecting aunt and she barely got her parents back. Her father went through unimaginable suffering for them to be together. _And they were,_ River thinks, _till the end. But… is their family the price of that?_

“Do you have children, Professor Song?” Her grandmother’s voice disrupts her chain of thought.

“I’m sorry?” River blinks at her.

“I asked your husband once but he didn’t reply.”

“Huh, no, we don’t,” River says making a little shrug. “Our lives don’t allow us to settle down exactly. Dangerous jobs, you see.”

“It’s being an archaeologist something dangerous?” Tabetha laughs.

“In my field? Always.” River’s voice changes from awkwardness to a sort of pride and her grandmother smiles at her, touching her hand lightly. A knot forms in River’s throat, but she doesn’t show it, just smiles, thankful for the gesture.

Tabetha Pond was never malicious or negative about her, not as far as River remembers. If she had grown up in the version of the timeline where Sharon had raised Amy, River is quite sure she never would have been able to be close to her mother like she had been. But something about such a simple question bugs her, because she dares to imagine the same scene in a different scenario, with her grandmother just asking this as an annoying grandma-question. Or even Amy doing it.

She shushes the thought away. _It’s not right,_ she tells herself, _why burden them with your overly complicated existence? They tolerate you enough as Professor Song._

“I’ll help you,” she stands up when Amy starts to pick up the dishes.

“I’m sorry about Aunt Sharon,” Amy says when they arrive in the kitchen. “And Mum’s awkward questions.”

“Sharon never liked me, not with any face and the feeling is mutual,” River shrugs and her mother frowns and turns around, blinking at her for a moment. Then she shakes her head, scoffing.

“I’m sorry,” Amy says, “sometimes I forget…”

“Don’t worry,” River smothers her. “I know what it is to have your memory messed around.”

They stay in silence for a while until Amy speaks out again. “Did you two had a fight or something? You’re awfully quiet.”

“What?” River says. “No, nothing like that. I - Amy?”

“Yeah?”

“Are you happy here?” Amy gives a strange look. “I mean, in Leadworth, is everything fine? With Rory? With your parents, with the job?”

“Of course, we are fine,” her mother says, in the same tone that River herself would use. “We had our bad times, but nothing that a little near-death experience doesn’t fix.”

River tries to focus her memories to understand what she is talking about. Oh, right, the Dalek Asylum. The Doctor had talked about that the first time, happy that her parents had not divorced and sorted out their communication problems. River had listened to that with her hands gripping the controls of TARDIS. Half happy, half miserable. The first because she was glad they were together again; the second because she knew that they wouldn't have had that fight at all if it hadn't been for her.

After that, River had decreased her visits to her parents. What good would she do if she was nothing but a reminder?[2] And her parents never complained about it, they seemed better. They looked better, even now.

 _This is their time,_ she thinks, _this is their home, their parents, their careers. How can I abandon them to that? Mum has barely got her own parents back. They will be together no matter what, but they don't have to leave everything to do that. But that's not why Charlotte helped me, is it? She did it so I could find a way to save myself._

Her own voice echoes in her mind. _Selfish, selfish, selfish._ When she came out of the database, all she could think about was how to escape own her fate. A fixed point knotted hundreds of times. How could she save herself?

She has a second chance to save herself from the Library, even if it’s a fixed point. She has avoided them before. But Manhattan has not been fixed, not yet. And if she is lucky, it won't ever be.

"I'm off!" she says suddenly, typing the coordinates in her vortex manipulator. Her mother turns around, surprised.

"Oh - hmm. Okay." River grabs her shoulders plants a big kiss on her cheek.

"Tell Dad I say goodbye. You will see me soon, anyway."

"Where?" Her mother asks and River can't contain the big smile on her face and the sensation of hope filling her hearts.

"Spoilers."

* * *

_I knew what I had to do. When I had too. New York, April 3rd. Winter Quay. There wouldn’t be a Melody Malone. Not a detective trying to get a case just for the fun of it or for money. It was just me, a daughter that was trying to make sure that my parents didn’t have to grow old as I had grown up._

* * *

River grips her bag tightly when she arrives in New York on April 3rd of 1938. Winter Quay hovers over her, ugly, but completely normal for the humans’ eyes. She has a chance with this, it’s just an hour before her father had been snatched back. Winter Quay was the key to everything that happened in Manhattan, from the disappearances to that final, to the solitary angel taking her parents. It needs to go.

You can’t kill a stone, but you certainly can destroy its nest.

She takes a deep breath and steps inside.

The hotel is dark but there are still enough lights for her to walk around and see. River grips her blaster when she hears rapid footsteps coming closer, but she almost falls over when someone crashes against her. The lights blink.

“What—?” River holds her weapon ignoring the man’s question. She stares at the figure that the blinking lights have brought.

“Whatever you do, don’t turn around,” she says slowly. “Is there another one behind me?”

“Yes,” the man breathes out.

“Don’t stop looking at it. Don’t blink,” River notices that the man is trembling but obeys. “Now, try to walk past it through the corridor and get to the door. If you see one, look at it without blinking until you're out.”

“What is this?” the man hisses as he and River walk in parallel directions. “What is this place? First that old man and now this— “

 _Old man?_ “Are you Sam Garner?” River asks.[3]

“Do I know you, ma’am?” Well, he hadn't known her the first time, just paid to track her. And there is no Melody Malone in this timeline, not anymore, River had just gone to buy the necessary bombs to destroy the building right away from Leadworth.

“No, you don’t,” River says, raising her voice as the go further apart, eyeing a room where she can hide at the end of the corridor. “Did you say that you saw an old man?”

“Yes, but what did he mean—?”

“I’m sorry, Sam, but you’re on your own.” River steps inside the room and closes the door before the man can ask again. She hears his footsteps up to the roof of the building and the angels blinking the lights. The room where she is now won’t be safe for long, she has to be quick.

She takes the bomb and detonators from her bag and sets the timers to half an hour. The little explosives are almost impossible to detect and even if the angels found them, it would be too late. She has enough time to escape safely and intercept Rory when/if the angels sent him back.

She takes another deep breath once she sets down everything and starts the countdown.

The light blinks and an angel is in front of her. River freezes in the threshold and holds her gaze on it while starting to walk again. Her hand grips the gun tight as she starts to walk away from it, hope increasing with every step to the door…

Then the lights go out entirely.

And before she can blink cold hands hold her shoulders and one grips her wrist tightly.

“No!” The scream comes out as the lights blink and blink and the angels approach. Her gun falls to the floor as she tries to look at all of them. They come for her fast. So fast.

The light blink and they drag her back to the room, their cold hands gripping her with that supernatural force as she fights. When she is inside, the lights go out again and when they come back, the eyes of an angel look right to hers. No, not its eyes, a picture, an image hold right in front of her face…

“No!” River closes her eyes quickly, but the tumbling inside her head has already begun. The angels keep holding her and then a voice sounds inside the room.

“We were waiting for you, River Song, Melody Malone.”

It’s an old man’s voice, gruff and American.

“What?”

“There are plenty of bodies here to provide us with an easy way to communicate,” the angel says. “We saw you investigating Max Kliener.[4] But then you didn’t, you came here instead. You’re changing the past. We were waiting for you.”

“Waiting?” River mutters.

“The angels retain memories of other timelines too, my dear. We assumed that you would come for Winter Quay. So clever, so full of knowledge of the future, believing you can leave us without our supplies.” The old man’s voice scoffs and a cacophony of noise follows him. The angels laugh.

“Now, you only have to choose how to die, River Song,” the creature says and River clenches her jaw. How could she had been so careless? “If you try to escape, then we will break your bones. Or you can open your eyes and the angel inside you can kill you slowly. But don’t worry, you will have company.”

“Hello?” River’s blood goes cold when she hears her father’s voice, the panic grows inside her like a wave.

“Get out!” she screams. “Get out of here _now!_ ”

“Who’s there?” She hears the footsteps and the anguish makes her open her eyes.

 _He is lost,_ a voice says in her head. Her own voice… No, no that’s not true.

“Stay away, don’t open the door!”

“River? River, what are you doing here? What is this place?”

“Please, Dad, you need to go!” River says but nobody replies, the room is filled with a chilling silence and her own comes out like a meek whisper. “Dad?... Dad?”

 _He is dead, he is gone._ It doesn’t really matter if it’s her voice or the angel’s, that’s the only thing that comes to her head.

She falls to her knees.

* * *

_I should have known. I should have been more careful. But again, my knowledge of the future and my overconfidence played me for a fool. This time there wasn’t anyone that had planned ahead of me except my enemy._

_All I could think for those minutes was that I would die in pain and alone like I had when I was a child._

* * *

_One._

The angel makes her count, just like the one that had infected her mother so long ago.

_Two._

Rory might already be in one of the rooms or maybe the angels just snapped his neck. Maybe he is outside this room, cooling down with his eyes looking at the darkness.

_Three._

She had been so stupid. How could she not make a better plan? Why not create a paradox? Why not wait for Rory and take him away in the first place?

_Four._

_Revenge._ Her own voice says and she is not sure if it’s her or the angel. She always hated them, maybe she hadn’t lashed out, like the Doctor had, maybe she hadn’t screamed at the heavens because they hadn’t given her mother another choice, but she hated them. And she had wanted them to _pay_.

_Five._

Five minutes or an eternity might have happened, but River jumps when she hears the Doctor’s voice. “Amy, keep your eyes on it!”

She hears the screwdriver and a sob escapes from her mouth, partly because the exhaustion and relief of seeing him, and partly because she knows Rory’s body is not on the other side of the threshold.

The Doctor doesn’t waste time once he opens the door, he holds River’s face on his hands. “Close your eyes, River. River? Listen to me, you have an angel inside your head, I need you to close your eyes.”

 _They will die if you live._ The voice in her head says. _Paradox. Freak. Mistake._

“I can’t,” she murmurs, “I can’t.”

“Yes, you can, the angel is messing with your mind. You saw this happen before, River, you _have_ to close your eyes.” River looks at his face, The Doctor’s voice is urgent and his hands hold her face tightly; his eyes are glassy, probably because he has been keeping them open. _They will all die because of you,_ the voice says.

 _No,_ River thinks as the muscles of her face fight against the closing of her eyelights. _No._

The Doctor sighs with relief when she closes her eyes and starts moving around her. River tries to get up off her knees but her muscles barely respond. The angels are still holding her jacket and her wrist.

“It has you held pretty tight.” Her husband murmurs. “Eyes on the angels, Amy always.”

“Doctor, I can’t do this forever! Can’t you break that angel’s hand?” Her mother spats.

There are some seconds of silence, but the Doctor doesn’t answer that, instead, he lets out a growl of frustration and his hand goes for a moment to cup River’s face. “I’m sorry,” he whispers, “I’m so sorry, honey, but please, _please_ keep your eyes closed.”

River is sure that these last minutes had made her stop feeling her hand and that’s why The Doctor suddenly twisting and breaking her wrist out of the angel’s grip makes her fall down on the floor.

“Why did you do that?” Amy screams.

“Goddammit, Amy!” The Doctor bites out suddenly, River can hear him ripping the fabric of her jacket. His arms circle around her waist as he helps River up.

”What?” Her mother yelps.

“Do you still have that book?” The Doctor’s voice is a low growl.

“Yes, in my pocket— “

“Don’t you dare to read ahead again!” He says harshly. “Go on, I got her. You have to go in front.”

“No… Doctor, don’t,” River whispers struggling to not open her eyes and help her mother. But the book, how can the book exist?

“What about Rory?” Amy’s voice is tight.

“Listen, we will find Rory wherever or whenever he is, but first I need to get River to somewhere safe.” The Doctor takes a step back, holding River against his side. An angel? “Wherever they sent him, I can go with the TARDIS but that thing has a countdown inside River’s head, so _please_ , let’s do this first.”

River’s head indeed is messy as they walk, they move again and she sees the lights of the hotel blink through her eyelids. They walk into a room and River walks away from The Doctor and opens her eyes. She can’t bear to have them closed anymore. Then she instantly notices, they are in that room, they are in the room where she had…

_You have killed them._

The lights keep blinking. Outside, the angels start to bang the door.

“There is a bomb in this room,” her voice sounds hollow as the weakness takes her body again. The Doctor rushes to her. “It will detonate in five minutes.”

“For God’s sake, River, you have to close your eyes, where is it?”

“Under the bed and the detonator is in the nightstand.” Amy rushes at the nightstand and River looks at The Doctor, her eyes prickling with tears. “This is a farm. They are feeding off the lives of people that they trap here. If we find Rory even by accident, we fix it. You have to take my vortex manipulator and get him.”

“I won’t leave you here,” The Doctor hisses.

“The angel will kill me, you have no crack in time to fix this. Three!” The number comes out with a sob. “Please, please Doctor, just get them out of this place. This is my fault. You need to go back and find Rory…”

“I already found him,” Amy cuts her, she is holding a paper in one hand the detonator in the other. As she talks River feels as if the air in the room goes thinner. “ _Amy, I write this note during our final attempt to escape. We arrived in the year 1887. If you are reading this and our future selves are not in the room. That means we succeed. I’ll wait for you.”_

“He escaped?” The Doctor murmurs, Amy smiles tearfully.

“And I read ahead. I’m sorry, I can’t leave him.”

The Doctor gets up holding his hands up to Amy as he if trying to stop a wild tiger from attacking. “Amelia, I can’t let you do this, you will be creating a fixed point in time. I won’t be able to go back for you”

“Doctor, I have already done it! You two have to get out of here, I will be fine. I’ll be with him.”

“Mum, _please_ ,” River struggles to get up, her head pounding, the sound of the counting of the bomb and the angels banging the door marking time like a heartbeat about to stop. “You don’t know if you escaped! Two!”

But her mother doesn’t listen, just like she didn’t listen to The Doctor the first time. She stands tall, her expression feral even when her face is wet with tears.

“You left me once, Doctor, you looked at her eyes and closed the TARDIS’ door, I know that you’re capable of that.” The Doctor tenses and Amy smiles a bittersweet smile. “You can leave me behind. But I can’t leave Rory. Just like you can’t leave her. That’s why I never got my baby back, isn’t it?”

 _Failure, failure, failure,_ the angel chants inside River’s head but the tears are the ones that make her close her eyes again. But her strength doesn’t come back, instead, she feels The Doctor taking her vortex manipulator from her wrist and making her stand up.

“Fifty seconds left,” her mother says and River opens her eyes to see her one last time. Her hand is over the pommel of the door, she is smiling. “Take care of each other. I will tell Rory that you love him.”

That’s the last time that River sees her as the vortex manipulator snaps them further in time. The journey through the vortex has never felt so painful, like if it’s tearing her head apart.

Or maybe she is just dying again.

“One,” that's the last word that comes from her mouth as she falls down.

“River? No, no, no. Stay with me!” The Doctor catches her and cups her face, but River can’t feel it, she only can feel the pounding of the angel tearing her mind apart. “River, please, don’t do this.”

 _I’m sorry._ She wants to say it because she knows he knows that this isn’t how she is supposed to die. What disaster will her premature dead cause here? Her vision goes black… Maybe it’s better… She failed... She has killed her parents…

Her mind burns, but suddenly golden explodes behind her eye lights.

Golden?

She doesn’t remember any golden from when she died in the Library...

She coughs, the air coming into her lungs so hard that it hurts. Air... she is still breathing.

River opens her eyes, the Doctor is still holding her, the grip of his hands painful at the sides of her head. He is panting, pale as a ghost and seems to be about to faint but his grip does not loosen. His eyes are buried deep into River’s as if he expects the angel to come out.

River notices the golden particles coming out her skin. “What did you do?” She whispers hoarsely.

The Doctor lets out a sigh of relief that comes out like a sob. He lets go of her head and wraps River in his arms. “I’m sorry,” he mutters. “I’m so sorry.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1. River is refering to her sister/clones, that appeared in series 3 of _The Diary of River Song_. Since my trust in the wikia is flimsy, I also put this before Manhattan.[return to text]
> 
> 2. Reference to this conversation in the last story of series 3, _The Furies_ :
> 
>  **River Song:** You stole my entire childhood, from me and from my parents.
> 
>  **Madame Kovarian:** Oh, yes, I gather you've been in contact. How are the old gene doners? The Ginger and... The other one.
> 
>  **River Song:** I don't think they ever got over it. We never really talked about it and now we can't.
> 
>  **Madame Kovarian:** Don't want to exchange numbers? Can't say I am surprised.
> 
>  **River Song:** Even if they could- I am reminder. It's like they only had a dream they had a child.
> 
> The rest of it is, of course, River defending Amy and Rory because she talking to fucking Kovarian but this part was the one that hit me the most and you're gonna see more of my... Feelings about it next chapter. [return to text]
> 
> 3. Sam Garner is the detective that appears at the beginning of _The Angels Take Manhattan_. River, of course knows about it from the first time she did it because she wrote the Melody Malone book.[return to text]
> 
> 4. Max Kiener appearead in _The Angel's Kiss_ , the Melody Malone tie-in novel.[return to text]
> 
> [BTS/Glorified Author's Note.](https://ambitious-witch.tumblr.com/post/188021326108/from-silence-to-melody-bts)
> 
> Oh, well! You got here, I hope you liked this fast-paced monstrosity, it was certainly a ride to write it.


	4. The Dream Child

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> She feels The Doctor helping her to get up and taking her to the TARDIS. Her second mother hums warmly in her mind, trying to comfort her, but everything is so distant. The only thing that feels real in her mind are the memories. Her mother and the angels. Her father and the angels. And both times were the same.
> 
> Her father being taken before she could say goodbye. Her mother jumping to the angel to be with him, no matter who pleaded with her to stay, whatever it was River or The Doctor.
> 
> And her, where was her both times? One giving away, the other pleading. One acting as the daughter she should be, the other as the imperfect being that she is.
> 
> The words of the angel, her own voice, echoed in her head: You killed them. You killed. You killed them.
> 
>  _No,_ she thinks, shaking her head. _No, they made it, I know they did. The note…_
> 
> But time can be rewritten, can’t it?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wow, I can't believe that this fic is having such a good response... Or any response at all. I'm gonna be honest with you guys, I was quite sure that I wouldn't get past chapter three because the fandom seemed pretty... Empty of people in general, when it comes to this incarnation and River. I was expecting to get bored and go write in the Twelve/Clara fandom. So every time you guys popped with a comment I was like: "Oh, my God, there are real people in this ship still?!"
> 
> So, in short, thank you a lot for the reviews and for not flaming me because I'm going against normal fanon interpretations. I got a lot of hate the last time I was in an old fandom that has a lot of fanons that everyone has almost accepted as canon and that made me really weary about posting.
> 
> ... Just warning in case, I don't plan to stop doing it.
> 
> Anyway, I hope to enjoy more angst. Thanks to my beta, Whovianlord.
> 
>  **Music for this chapter:** [_An Insuperable Impediment_](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cuZp2LZ0AMQ) from _Jane Eyre_ , [_Guardian Angels_](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DIM9UoyxlPQ) from _Penny Dreadful_.

__

* * *

_Shock._ River tells herself. _You're in shock._

The Doctor had been quick with her vortex manipulator, landed them in a… park? It is a park? River can’t tell, it’s like she is not there, she might as well be back in the Library, back to being incorporeal and it wouldn’t feel different.

She feels The Doctor helping her to get up and taking her to the TARDIS. Her second mother hums warmly in her mind, trying to comfort her, but everything is so distant. The only thing that feels real in her mind are the memories. Her mother and the angels. Her father and the angels. And both times were the same.

Her father being taken before she could say goodbye. Her mother jumping to the angel to be with him, no matter who pleaded with her to stay, whatever it was River or The Doctor.

And her, where was her both times? One giving away, the other pleading. One acting as the daughter she should be, the other as the imperfect being that she is.

The words of the angel, her own voice, echoed in her head: _You killed them. You killed. You killed them._

 _No,_ she thinks, shaking her head. _No, they made it, I know they did. The note…_

But time can be rewritten, can’t it?

They can be dead for all she knows, they could have been captured by the angels back in 1887 and just killed or sent even further back. Lived their lives trapped in that horrible hotel…

Something stings over her hands and makes her hiss. “I’m sorry,” the Doctor says. They are in the TARDIS’ med-bay, how did they get to the med-bay? The Doctor is on his knees in front of her, healing the broken wrist. She had forgotten the pain of it, so trapped inside her mind, that what her body did became a secondary thing.

She looks down at The Doctor, he is still white as a sheet, concentrated on meddling her broken bones. The first time it hadn’t been like that, the first time…

The first she hadn’t almost died.

“What did you do?” River finds herself asking. “I was… I was dead.”

“Regeneration energy,” he says, his voice hoarse.

“What?”

“It burned the angel, I think - I guess. I don’t know.” He passes a hand through his hair.[1]

“Why did you do that?” She hisses. “Wasting your regeneration energy— “

“I wasn’t _thinking_ , River, I just did it!” He snaps, getting on his feet. “I didn’t know if it was going to work, I didn’t even know what I was trying because I never tried to kill a damn Weeping Angel residing in somebody’s mind.” He sighs. “And on the why... Are you…? Are you really asking me why I saved your life?”

River doesn’t answer, instead, she looks at her broken wrist and thinks about the first time. She had been upset that time too when he had just looked at her after her confession and used years of his life to heal it.

“But you’ll die now.” The words came from her mouth bitterly, like a child accepting death for the first time. _But you can’t,_ she thinks, _they can’t, this wasn’t supposed to happen._

The Doctor sighs and kneels again, going back to fix her injured hand. “We’ll all die someday, River, how many times have you told me that? I can’t keep cheating death forever. I’m afraid you’re stuck with this face.”

He tries to smile, but River doesn’t return it, her head is spinning and she can’t stop thinking about her parents. Why is he so calm? Why was he so calm during the whole of it?

“How did you find me?” The question comes out, she knows how it was the first time: the Melody Malone book. But now… What happened now? She never became a detective in New York.

“The book, the one you haven’t written yet, it had the year and place where you were and it said you were trapped and needed help. It also said that Rory was there, I drew my own conclusion.“ The Doctor explains. “I think— I think that Amy took it with her. It might be better, we can’t know what will happen.”

_Sure you think that._

“Do you think they are still alive?” River whispers instead, she can’t think on whatever future was written in that book or will be written. Not now. Not while is still a possibility to change it…

“Yes, I think so,” The Doctor says but his voice doesn’t have a single drop of hope, just plain resignation. “They probably made it, they are smart. The angels probably didn’t have a chance against Amy Pond and her Last Centurion.”

“What did she mean?” River asks, ignoring his tune. “About you leaving her behind? About not getting her baby back?”

“That was a long time ago, it hardly matters now,” he says, still focused on her injury.

“ _What_ did she mean?” she repeats, biting every word and getting her hand off his grasp. “ _Doctor._ ”

“We were in Apalapucia, once,” he says with a sigh. “It was my fault, I didn’t get the dates right and we ended up in a medical facility that worked with two different time-streams. Amy got stuck into the faster one for thirty-six years.” River looks at him, horrified.

“She never told me that.”

“I can guess why because for her it never happened,” the Doctor continues and gets, holding the bridge of his nose. “We managed to find Amy in the slower time-stream but Rory wanted to take the other one, that Amy that had grown old there, with us. We couldn’t do that, the paradox of the two different time-streams was massive and the Old Girl couldn’t have contained it; but I lied to them that we could, so she would help them escape. Then I closed the door on her face.”

“And she was erased,” River mutters and The Doctor nodes, clenching his jaw.

“I told Rory he had a choice to make, we couldn’t keep both of them.” He doesn’t seem proud of it, but doesn’t regret it either, River can tell. But there is some sentiment inhis expression that she can’t quite place. Is it pity? Compassion for the choice he had forced her father to make?

No.

No.

It's something else.

_You can leave me behind. But I can’t leave Rory. Just like you can’t leave her. That’s why I never got my baby back, isn’t it?”_

_That’s why I never got my baby back, isn’t it?”_

_Oh,_ she thinks, feeling a knot forming in her throat. But she can't tell if it's sadness or anger. Maybe it's both.

"Tell me," River says, making every effort to not slap him this time. "How long did my mother plead for you to get her child back?"

"River—" he starts.

"How long?" She cuts him. "Weeks? Months? Didn't you think that maybe you could have? That maybe it didn't end in Demon's Run? For God's sake, you were in Florida, Doctor, _I_ saw you there!"

"River, you know what would have happened if I had done it, you refused to go to Demon's Run for that," he says and she knows, the rational part of her mind knows. She would have been erased. But all of what she can think now is the dreadful possibility of her parents being trapped in the hotel. Of worsening their destiny because she had tried to change it. But if she can't save them, how can she save herself?

"Maybe you should have," the words come low and full anger. The Doctor stares at her and shakes his head. "Maybe if you have got them their daughter back, now they wouldn't be—"

" _You_ are their daughter!" He raises his voice and River shakes her head. "What did you want me to do, River? They never - they never seemed to see that you wouldn't have existed if I did it. I couldn't do it, it wouldn't have been different than killing you."

The words hurt more than a physical blow. _No, it's not like that,_ she thinks, _they wanted those days with me. The childhood that Kovarian stole from us. The childhood you stole from us._

"So you murdered your own children and you put my parents in the same box for wanting their baby back?"

River regrets the words the second they come out of her mouth. But it's too late, if she had actually slapped him he would have probably looked less vexed.

"Doctor —"

"If you want to do it, then go," he hisses. "It's your life, River, I won't change it. But if you think that it's worth so little that you should just erase it because you feel in debt… "

"In debt?!"

"....Or whatever you think you owe your parents!" he continues harshly. "But she was right, I made my choice, years ago after Demon's Run. If you want to do this, then it’s yours to make. I don't want any part in it."

He leaves after that, River falls down on her knees and buries her hands in her hair. _I failed,_ she thinks, _Mum, Dad, I'm so sorry._

* * *

“We have to tell Brian,” The Doctor says after what can be hours or centuries. In the TARDIS, it’s hard to know. They haven’t talked since their argument and River spent most of the time locked in their room. “And the Ponds, I don’t know if they would be ever able to contact them from the time they ended up in.”

 _If they survived._ River knows that those are the words that he has left out. She turns around and The Doctor is staring at her. She never went to see Brian the first time and she doubts he did either. The fact that the book was published when she had sent it ten years before her parent’s destination and her mother’s multiple books had been enough for her. Enough to know that they have lived. Now she is blind and any information would just fix it…

The Doctor sighs and enters the room, sitting next to River.

“River, it’s done, it’s fixed,” he says “Whatever happened, we can’t stay here forever for fear of fixing it. Amy did it at the moment she read that note.”

 _Like you did when you read that book,_ River thinks bitterly. Just that this time, The Doctor hadn’t read it, it hadn’t been a little spark of hope in which her parents could fix it. It had been quick as a bullet through her heart.

“Your grandfather might want the company now,” The Doctor continues, tentatively. “You can be with him and the Ponds - the older Ponds, I’m sure that…”

 _They don’t know I exist, Doctor_ , River thinks, gritting her teeth, but she doesn’t say it. Instead, she gets up off the bed and starts walking to the console.

“Alright, then, let’s go.”

“River...”

 _Doctor, if they were murdered by those monsters,_ she thinks and grips her hands on the controls of the console.

“No, let’s go now. No shortcuts. I also want to see you explain that to Brian, anyway, or the Ponds. They might kill you this time for all we know.”

He doesn’t answer her comment, just nods as River pulls the labels and marks the coordinates to 2010, Leadworth. Taking a deep breath because she has to face and give condolences to a grandfather that can’t know a single word about her pain.

But when they arrive, it seems that someone got there first.

River and the Doctor step out of the TARDIS and get close to the house with the blue door, but before either of them can even knock the door opens and she instinctively protects herself when Brian Williams rushes over to her husband and punches him in the face.

The Doctor stumbles when her grandfather hits him but doesn’t fall and River knows for sure that he could have avoided the punch if he wanted.[2]

“Brian…” The Doctor starts.

“You told me ‘never them’,” her grandfather hisses and River clenches her jaw.

“I know,” The Doctor says composing himself. “I’m sorry.”

“Brian!” A woman’s voice says and River turns around to see an old woman walking towards them. “I’m so sorry, I should have known once we saw the box. Brian…”

“It’s alright, Elizabeth,” Brian says, “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have done that.”

“No matter, Brian.”

“Well, I guess you already know who he is, ” Brian says, talking to the woman. “Doctor, Professor Song, this is Elizabeth Williams, my great-granddaughter.” River looks at the Doctor, if he is surprised about her grandfather addressing her like a stranger, he doesn’t say it.

“Granny told us so many stories about you,” Elizabeth says with her thick American accent and shakes The Doctor’s hand, then she offers it to River, who can’t help but stare at her. “A pleasure, ma’am, what incredible hair you have.”

River barely breathes as the woman shakes her hand, The Doctor moves behind her, brushing his hand against her forearm. Elizabeth tells them that they should know about their grandparents ‘adventures’ and insists on Brian to let them pass and meet her brother.

The Ponds are in the house too, Augustus Pond doesn’t try to hit The Doctor — though River wonders if he thought about it and decided against it when he saw Brian putting ice on his hand.

Arthur and Elizabeth Williams are in their early seventies, they are twins and Anthony Williams’s children, the son that Amy and Rory adopted in 1900.[3]

River listens to all this information like she is reading a history book, like she is back in Luna doing her exams or in the high school in Leadworth, reading about stories that conflicted with her memories of what had _really_ happened.

She doesn’t say anything during all the time in the house. She looks at old, dusted baby pictures of the man that is said to have been her parents’ son. Of her parents in Victorian clothes.

She looks at her husband, with his pale, bruised face accepting her grandparents' snide comments.

“So, they lived long? What about the First World War?” Brian asks, concerned as if his son still in the town and not long dead.

“I think that grandpa was around eighty-two when he passed, it was very peaceful or that’s what Dad told us, anyway. Granny died when we were five, she was eighty-five but full of life till the end.”

That seems to calm her grandparents and when everything seems to take an almost pleasant air, they also look at River. Tabetha’s previous looks of warm curiosity now are clouded with disgust, because she was there with her daughter and did nothing. Augustus just shakes Arthur's and presses a kiss on Elizabeth’s cheek, sitting down to hear what were the whereabouts of his daughter and son-in-law during all those years.

They are lovely people, kind, but every word they say just feels like a nail in an ever deeper coffin.

She listens to everything and nothing. They talk about her father’s bravery to get them out of the hard times and during the war. About her mother’s career as an author, how her books can be seen as classics now. The twins talk about their father, about his life, how he was an orphan and how Amelia and Rory Williams saved him from growing up in the streets like many of the children from the orphanage where they took him.

River had lived on the streets too. She had died on them. She had raised again and moved sky and earth to find them. To find that woman in that photograph, that man in the Centurion armour that appeared in her dreams, like a distant memory.

They had been her shield, her support when Kovarian’s hand crashed against her face when the Silents erased her memory again, again and _again._

With every word, she remembers every visit she did after they knew the truth about her. Every awkward dinner and basic conversation, every time that she sometimes went down to the living room and found Amy holding that praying leaf that Lorna Bucket had given her. Like if River wasn’t there, just on the first floor.

They keep talking and talking and inside she is screaming. She wishes she could scream now. She wishes they would just _shut up._

“We never met Grandpa, but the little we had her with us, Granny filled us with stories about the Last Centurion and the Pandorica, Doctor,” Elizabeth smiles at him and the Doctor manages to give her a perfectly faked smile back. “Dad, of course, believed it all, always.”

“So, they didn’t have any other children?” she hears Tabitha ask.

“No. it was just Dad,” Arthur replies. “He always said that they probably would have, but Granny said that they were perfect with him.”

_Perfect._

Something breaks within her, she stands up brusquely and all the members of the Pond-Williams family turn around to her. Their faces, none of what she resembles in a single aspect, looking at her with strangeness and mildly offended. Oh, what a picture must she be! Crazy, out-worldly River Song, with her wild curls and her sharp stare.

“River?”

She doesn’t excuse herself and she turns around, typing the coordinates in her vortex manipulator by reflection, ignoring The Doctor’s worried calls.

* * *

The rain that falls outside the orphanage quickly covers her from head to toe. This place had been the scenery of her nightmares so many times. The empty corridors, the help notes written by her poor, brainwashed caretaker.

“Who is the woman in the picture?” she had asked him once.

“The woman?” Doctor Renfrew had frowned and hunched to her height, staring at the picture with his confused eyes. “Well, the woman, the woman is your mother, Miss Melody.”

“Where is she?”

“She? Huh, she?” the man had shuttered. “She had to go away for a while, that’s why we are caring for you.”

“You know who this is?” Kovarian had asked her later that same night. Melody had nodded.

“My mother.”

“Your gene doner,” the woman corrected harshly. “She gave you up, Melody. Because you were different, because you were not like the child they had dreamt. But we took you and gave you a greater purpose. _She_ was with the demon. And all the demon’s associates…?”

“Are the enemy,” Melody had recited.

“Very good,” Kovarian had smiled but then had taken the girl’s chin, sinking her nails in her skin. “And _I_ am your mother. Never forget that.”

“No, Madame.” _You lie_ , she had thought instead, _she loves me. She is my mother, you are a liar._

Lightning breaks across the sky, it had been raining like this the day she had escaped. She hadn’t cared, she just wanted to find her mummy, to escape from the spacesuit. But her mother had shot her and screamed with horror, and the Silents had taken Melody away before she could talk.

Then she was Mels: feisty, troublesome Mels. Always behind Amy, always causing trouble so Amy could stop her, so Amy could be the hero, could be the parent. Because that was what parents did, wasn’t it? They stop naughty children misbehaving.

 _I’m here,_ she had thought all those years. _I’m your daughter, I am not bad. I am not broken. You’ll want me. I’ll make you want me._

But they had never wanted her, had they? Not her. Not Mels. Not River. Just Melody, little Melody. The Melody that still had Amy’s smile and Rory’s hair, the Melody who still had time to be fixed. Their dream child.

She can’t go to Demon’s Run, it’s too dangerous, but here, in Graystark Hall Orphanage, maybe here she has a chance.[4]

River is already walking towards it when she hears the TARDIS’ wheezing, she doesn’t stop, she just wants to get it done.

“River!” The Doctor runs behind her and takes her by the arm.

“Come to finish the job with me, sweetie? Let’s go, then,” she says and starts to walk again, but he grabs her arm tightly and makes her turn around.

“River, what you’re talking about? Let’s go home, we shouldn’t be here.”

“You shouldn’t.” River spats freeing herself from him. “You couldn't do it, so I am going too. As you said, it’s my choice.”

“I shouldn't have said that— Please, stop! Don’t do it, River, not like this!” He shouts under the crash of the rain. “You’re hurting, you are not thinking straighter than I was last night. You can’t erase yourself— “

“Why can’t I?! Tell me!” River screams turning around. She is crying, she notices, but her tears are as cold as the raindrops. “What difference would it make if I do it now? What difference would it make for them? The child living inside that orphanage is the only thing that matters. Not the broken, unnatural _thing_ she became! They erased River Song long ago, Doctor. Like nothing I ever did matter, like I was _nothing!_ ”

River uses his shock at her words to start running, the freezing, heavy rain still over her making her movements even slower. She trips and suddenly The Doctor’s arms circle around her body, she fights with all the strength that her tired and cold body can give. She elbows him, sinks her nails on the skin of his hands, headbutts him hard enough to hear the bones of his nose crack.

“Let go of me!” She screams, sobs, she should be able to get him off, she has always been stronger. But she feels so cold, so tired, she falls on her knees. “Let me go, Doctor, _please!_ ”

“No.” his voice is low and harsh, he is as pale and weak as last night, but the grip he has around her body is firmer than ever.

“You will forget me,” she cries. “You will forget me and they will have the days she robbed them, the days they couldn’t have. I won’t be nothing but a bad dream.”

“I don’t care what they deserved,” The Doctor growls against her hair.

"You loved them."

“I did. But nothing that I felt about them would justify _this_ , River. Nothing they suffered will justify erasing yourself. Nothing.”

“They were everything for me,” River says. “Every bit hope since the moment I saw that picture on my room, no matter how much Kovarian taunted me with it. They were all the strength I could have. All I could identify as hope.” She falls against his chest, no longer able to control the tears. “I did everything wrong, Doctor. I found them when they were too small to care and when they cared, I just wasn’t what they needed anymore. They needed a daughter. I was just an anomaly.”

The Doctor is shaking against her, if it’s for the cold or another thing, River can’t say. She tries to free herself from his grip but his arms are still tense around her torso.

“Please, let me go,” she whispers. “Please, Doctor, this will fix everything. I will be who I had to be.”

“No, you will be what they wanted,” his arms hold her tight against his chest. “And that’s not who you are.

"You, River Song, Melody Pond, you’re that girl that walked the Earth to find her parents. You are the one that got them together. You are the one who found all those other children like you and saved them, without judging them or rejecting them. You are the one that gave Amy the clue to save me, to save us. You, broken and unnatural as you call yourself, are a miracle. If not for them, then for me. I would have never imagined that I would find someone as brilliant, loving and impossible as you are. ”

He slowly lets her go from his grip to turn her around and cup her face with his hands. “They were your parents and you loved them and you fought for them. Nobody can take that from you. Not even them. _This_ , River Song, this is who you are.”[5]

* * *

River doesn't know how long they stay there while she cries. _Never cry_ , she had told herself a lifetime ago, _you have already wept a sea of tears. What use does crying have?_

Apparently some, because she can't stop.

The Doctor helps her up eventually, telling her that the Silents could be alert that they are there. River doesn't answer, she just lets him take her inside the TARDIS.

The Doctor takes her to one of the TARDIS’s largest bathrooms and helps her out of her soaked clothes. She sinks in the bathtub and The Doctor kneels before it, touching her cheek with one hand and then pressing his lips against her forehead.

River looks at him, the bruise on his face is becoming a pale shade of violet, and she is pretty sure that his nose is broken or fractured by her headbutts.

But he still doesn't move, his eyes buried in hers intensely. Like he is waiting for something.

"It's okay," River says, her voice hoarse and wasted. "I'll be fine."

She means it, what can she do now? Where would she go? What she just did was… Ridiculous. Impossible. She would have torn apart reality _again_ and for what? For what?

The Doctor clearly doesn't buy it but sighs and gets up, leaving her alone. River sinks her hands in the bathtub and splashes her face with the hot water, cleaning out the traces of tears that the rain didn't wipe.

She goes back to their room and wraps herself under the covers. She is cold, shivering. Her body temperature is not as cold as a full Time Lord, but she knows she shouldn't feel _this_ cold.

What had happened the first time she had done this? She hadn't acted like this. She hadn't wept a tear, what good had it done? Her parents were fine, they had made it, they had lived a happy life. How would she honour their lives by lamenting that there were just not with her anymore?

She falls sick after it. It's almost comical.

The Doctor tells her that it's exhaustion, not eating enough and being so long out of in the rain. "Even Time Lords gets sick, River," he says as she groans and covers her face with the pillow. "You need to rest." He continues as if he hasn't been two days looking like a corpse.

He moves around in the TARDIS but never goes to sleep in their room. River wonders if he is cross at her, like the first time, when she had been the one that wanted to lick her wounds alone. River sees him come and go with food and water, sit on his desk reading, drawing or repairing one of his screwdrivers or some other little gadget.

River doesn't want to rest, she doesn't want to sleep and have nightmares about stone monsters. What she needs is to _run_ , she needs to take her vortex manipulator, her blaster and offer herself for a life-threatening expedition. Piss off some army of dumb conquerors just because she can. She wants to stop feeling this crushing emptiness, this anger, this feeling that so many years were for nothing.

So, she gets up one 'night' when she doesn't see the Doctor around and runs.

The TARDIS is infinite after all.

She walks in the corridors, runs in the gardens and sinks herself in the swimming pool. How many years did it take her to get over her fear over going underwater? Two at the most. It had been little after her wedding. The Doctor had been with her all the way through it, back when their time together wasn't running out like sand between their fingers.

Now they are linear, technically speaking, and years ago, she would have been so happy. So relieved that they still have some time together. But like their first time when her parents died, she runs for an entire month. She runs away from his patience and understanding, she runs away from his serious glares and concerned faces. She runs away from his old eyes, the ones that know her and finds herself in front of the TARDIS' door, her hand gripping the pommel.

She can run now, she can go away, find some younger him — one that doesn't know her at all — pretend and have an adventure until the pain just passes. She can be River Song, Melody Pond, the archaeologist, the superhero.

Wasn't that what everyone wanted? Wasn't it what her parents wanted?

Anthony Williams hadn't been a superhero. He had been an accountant, lived a normal life, with his normal parents and his ordinary family.

And her?

What about her?

What had they wanted from River Song? Someone to check on The Doctor? A friend? Someone that came to tell them that everything was fine no matter how much she was falling apart inside?

 _Nothing, nothing, nothing._ Her own voice chants.

River sighs, resting her forehead on the TARDIS’ door. Her second mother hums, the warm energy that comes from her easing River's throbbing head.

She slowly steps away from the door and the console room, heading straight to their bedroom.

It surprises her to see The Doctor there, actually sleeping. River undresses and lies under the covers, facing him. The bruises on his face have healed, but she sees a dry trace of tears over his cheek. She cuddles him, pressing her face against his hearts and his arms circle around her body.

"I'm sorry," he says, she knows he still feels guilty for what she tried to do in Florida.

"I'm sorry too," she whispers. "For what happened at the orphanage. For what I said that day. About your children."

River feels his body tense against her and for a moment she thinks he is going to get up. But The Doctor sighs and presses his chin against her hair.

"I didn't kill them, you know."

"Doctor— "

"They were already dead when I started fighting in the war," he says and River lifts her head, surprised. He never told her about them. She had met his granddaughter. But anything before that he had always kept it to himself. She had assumed they had been alive after he had saved Gallifrey. Even when now he still doesn’t know about it. "When I left Gallifrey and took Susan with me, her father, my oldest son, had put an order of execution on my head. So, I ran and didn't look back for a long time. I was scared, angry. Can't even remember why they were angry at me in the first place.[6]

"But after the Time War was finally too much to ignore and I came back, I decided to look for him, the one that hadn't died for all I knew. My two girls had, during a bombing. I didn’t really do it for myself, but for Susan. She had joined the forces way before I did and I just wanted to know if my son, the all-powerful ex Lord President of Gallifrey had at least visited his daughter's grave."[7]

He lets out a bitter laugh.

"Koschei - The Master, I mean, was there when I found out. I asked if he had seen him since he had been there longer than I, but he looked at me like I was the crazy one and said that because of the Council's latest mission, I technically never had any children."

River opens her eyes in horror but The Doctor is not looking at her, his eyes are hundreds of years away.

"He told me that Susan had learned that she had always been by my side, no parents. I guess that was half-truth, my son and his wife never showed much interest in her, buried in politics as they were. But I knew they had existed. That they were her parents."

"What happened to them?" River asks, The Doctor shrugs, avoiding her eyes again.

"Temporal erasure, my people made it their most _effective_ weapon. Just destroying the species' world before it begins and you spare yourself of having to defeat them in the battlefield. I guess, inside one of those many species they took away was an ancestor of my wife. Or that I theorized."[8]

He looks at her this time, rubbing his thumb against her cheek.

"I can't put myself in Amy and Rory's shoes, River, I saw my children grown up, I saw two of them regenerate. But if I could have them back, if they existed again somewhere else besides my memory. I wouldn't really care how old they are or if they still hate me."

"Do you think that they would have loved me if I had grown up with them? Linearly?" River asks.

The Doctor takes a deep breath and she asks herself if he is balancing how to answer as her husband or as Amelia and Rory Pond's best friend.

"I don't know."

“I think…” River licks her lips and closes her eyes, trying to get the words right. “I think that I was too much like you. They kept you separated from their lives on Earth. They added me too. I told myself it was fine, that I couldn’t demand anything from them, that they had gone through too much. But sometimes, I wanted to ask them just... To be my friends again?” She wants to laugh because of how ridiculous that sounds now. “Every time I went to visit them… It felt like I was inside a play but I didn’t know what the script was."

Her mother calling her Melody before she died the first time but never doing it when they were alone. Not even 'Mels'. Calling River her daughter only mostly when The Doctor was around. Her father barely talking to her because there was little to say. Or maybe nothing, what would he talk about with _her_ , anyway?

But it wasn't her fault, she sees now. It wasn't her fault they never saw through her age, though her experience, through her name. It wasn't her fault they never stopped looking for someone that would have never existed.

“Once, Kovarian asked me if I would have ever been happy on Earth, with them and with a little sibling or if I would have gone crazy of boredom.”

“And what did you answer?”

“That I would never know, but I would have liked to have the choice.”

She sighs, thinking about herself, not ageing in Leadworth. Years and years with two parents that might have loved her as she was. But not really, because it’s not really her. That person would have never been _her._

 _And my choice is made,_ she thinks, _maybe is for the best. Being River Song… That's one of the few things in my life I was allowed to choose._

River closes her eyes and lets the exhaustion take over her. She could run and bury this, yes. Like she did the first time.

But why have a second chance if you are going to repeat the same mistakes?

* * *

It gets better, with time. They stay in the TARDIS, for the first time in years, without running, they are too tired to run for now. They are not all the time together, but enough, the ship is its own universe. But when they are together, they talk, River hadn’t realised how much she missed talking to him, to have each other's presence close without fear of spoilers or the awkwardness of the other being younger.

She knows that soon these times will be over, that soon she will have to start planning what to do, but unlike the first time she wants to enjoy them all that she can.

Some weeks later — or what you can count in the TARDIS, they are having breakfast in the library. The Doctor brings the food and sinks his nose in a book. River stares at him and stares at the plate.

"What?" he says raising a brow.

"It's just the only mystery that I will never solve, sweetie."

"And what is it?"

"How do you cook better than me," River says and The Doctor laughs. "Oh, don't inflate your ego, it's the _only_ thing you do better than me."

"I never deny it, Professor," he teases her and goes back to his book. River looks down at the notebook she has in her own lap. She has to write that book, the book that took The Doctor to Manhattan. But The Doctor hasn't told her much about it, saying that it has to come from herself or either she can just write the instructions on a paper and put it in his younger self's tweed pocket. Little can change that now. But she doesn't know where to start. What was the book about? The angels? Her parents? Her failure?

Or her.

Maybe it is about her.

About this.

About a girl that escaped the monsters. About a woman that chose her own destiny and put herself in an unwilling, endless battle against a child that would never exist.

River scoffs and writes the title on the first page.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1. There is no official information in 'canon' about how you can cure a person of having a Weeping Angel in their head as far as I could watch/listen. So, this of burning it with the regeneration energy is totally my invention. Also I wanted to a parallel with _Let's Kill Hitler._ [return to text]
> 
> 2. Even if the 'canon' information about the Time Lord's physhical resistance/reflexes changes all the time. I'm pretty sure that a hit from a human wouldn't do as much damage as it would normally. I mean, Rory did punch Eleven in _The Big Bang_ and he didn't have any bruises. Not mentioning the falling from great distances and so on.[return to text]
> 
> 3. Amy and Rory's new timeline:
> 
> They adopt Anthony in 1900.
> 
> Amy dies at 87 in 1942.
> 
> Rory died at 82 in 1937.
> 
> Anthony died at 92 in 1992.
> 
> Anthony's children Arthur and Elizabeth, born in 1937.[return to text]
> 
> 4. The Nightmare Room was River's room when she was kept in Demon's Run (The Diary of River Song, series 3: _The Furies_ )[return to text]
> 
> 5. River had a similar scene with the Eighth Doctor in _Life in Ruins_ when poor fella was mind-wacked again and had a psychotic break.[return to text]
> 
> 6. The theory about the Doctor not having a good relationship with his children because of Gallifrey's corruption comes from [this post.](https://notyoujamie.tumblr.com/post/186098075915/what-if-the-doctor-left-gallifrey-with-susan) The rest is just my invention. I know that the common belief is that somehow his children and/or Susan are alive but I doubt it because the war wasn't two minutes long. It was centuries-long and what we saw in _The Day of the Doctor_ was a tiny, tiny part of it, not mention the end. And also even after he saves Gallifrey, the Doctor still lists them 'disappeared or dead' according to Clara. And given Nine, Ten and Eleven's body language when the subject is brought up... Well, it's not a far a off conclusion.[return to text]
> 
> 7. Susan indeed joined the Time War before the Doctor, it's shown in the Short Trip story, _Hands on the Deck_.[return to text]
> 
> 8. Temporal erasure was a thing used by the Time Lords during the Time War, erasing entire races as strategy, Big Finish does a really good job showing how terrible it is.
> 
> [return to text]
> 
> [BTS/Glorified Author's Note.](https://ambitious-witch.tumblr.com/post/188410559788/from-silence-to-melody-bts)
> 
> Okay, that's enough salt here, if you want more clink on the link above.
> 
> I hope you liked this angst fest. Next chapter we might have some fluff... And then more angst. Comments are appreciated!


	5. Parenthesis

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It feels like a little gift, this little week they have. A parenthesis in between the big events that are to come. River wonders if the universe just decides what is and is not important enough to change. Manhattan was too big, the Discordia too. Maybe the timelines are easing, River thinks on that week that they spent laughing, making love, saving planets. _Maybe there is time._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, new chapter! Thank you a lot for your reception, subscriptions and comments, mates.
> 
> Some things to communicate, since we are half the way of this story already, I have other three ideas to for when it finished, but because I will not publish them all at the same time and I still have to resume _We Were Nothing More Than Stardust_ , I will let you decide which one should I do next to this one. There are three:
> 
> * An Inception AU/All Human that I have been postponing for months. [Here is the gif trailer I made.](https://ambitious-witch.tumblr.com/post/185125436438/ad-astra-per-aspera-kate-lethbridge-stewart)
> 
> * Another Canon Divergence going on What If from _Let's Kill Hitler_ in which Mels is not shot by Hitler and stays the Doctor's enemy for a litter more time.
> 
> * An AU inspired by the movie [_Not Another Happy Ending_](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1808339/), except with the roles reversed of Eleven as the writer and River as the publisher.
> 
> You have time to vote until this story is finished. You can comment here or in the link down below.
> 
> I also did some modification in the tags, took out the "Angst with Happy Ending" one, Just making notice.
> 
>  **Music for this chapter:** [_Tram at Down_](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IzzDwaupoFE) from _The Reader._
> 
> Thanks to my beta, Whovianlord.

* * *

“Luna University, Professors,” The Doctor says with the same tired voice he has used during the whole adventure. “Try to not get into trouble for now.”

River looks at her husband’s eighth face with pity. It's the last time she would see him this year. She can't say he looks better than the last time, with all the creating android companions and having psychotic breaks that scare even her.

“You are taking all the trouble with you,” Bernice says and hugs him tight. “Take care of yourself, okay?”

The Doctor makes a non-committal sound and nods then turns around at River.

“Professor Song, a pleasure.”

“See you around, sweetie.”[1]

He will see her one last time, before…

No, she can’t think about that now.

“Do you think he will alright?” Bernice asks once they are heading back to the university. “I mean, I know you will be marrying a future him, but this him..”

“I’m afraid the war will catch up with him eventually.” _And stay with him for another five lives._ “That’s all I can say, I’m sorry. C’mon, I’ll get you a coffee, my communicator is buzzing like crazy and I really don’t want to see who it is.”

Bernice gives her a smile and River is happy about having gained her trust after butting heads during the beginning of the adventure. Compared with the bunch of dulls idiots that now run Luna University — Jemima Still, for example, who was currently busy ringing River incessantly — Bernice had always been one of her favourite professors. Even though, sometimes, she couldn’t hide her annoyance at River being a nosy student. Though, inside, River always thought that Bernice looked adorable when she was annoyed.

“So, it’s the next to him? Your Doctor?” Her old professor asks her once they are sat down in the university’s café. River shakes her head.

“I never met that one and I doubt I ever will,” she says, thinking in that lifetime that her husband doesn’t want to even mention. She has a picture of him given by the TARDIS just in case she meets him, though she doubts it will ever happen. ”That part of the timeline is plagued with paradoxes and time fluxes. It’s almost impossible to get in the heart of it with a vortex manipulator.”[2]

 _The closest I got was once in that expedition,_ River thinks about the memory of her first life, she will probably have to do it again. _Everyone died that time._ [3]

She has been thinking about it all these months, about what things she can keep changing. This thing with Bernice and The Doctor was impossible since she saw him again and also she really wasn’t sure about leaving them to face that alone. Bernice hadn’t been able to understand what was happening with him and the Doctor had simply been in a bad place and period.

“Do you live close by? I never knew where you came from when you took my classes.” They are outside the café now. River laughs, her days in the university were a mix between being the most dutiful student that the campus ever had and the wildest ones. But even then she had had a stiller life than now.

“I have a little flat but…” River shakes her head, scoffing. “I like to work outside the university. That’s the advantage of having time on your side. And also more things to do, places to see, money to gain.” She shrugs. “And I also have to save The Doctor once in a while.”

Even though she hasn’t seen him in a year, not the older him, just these younger versions that get in trouble every five minutes; River guesses that means that now their roles are officially turned, now she knows how she was during her time in Luna.

“Well,” Bernice says holding up her hand. “I never thought I would say this when I was your teacher, but it was good to see you, Professor Song.”

“And you, Professor Summerfield,” River shakes her hand.

Jemima keeps calling when River arrives in her flat. She knows why she is calling, though the first time she hadn’t, the sniving arsehole had left Gammarae do the dirty work and then everything had gone downhill after that.

But what can she do? Just ignore it? Ignore the threat that the Discordia presents to her future, to their lives? If she commits the same mistakes she did the first time, is it possible that they could win? What if the emperor is not moved this time or dies before she and The Doctor arrive? What if everything changes for this long course of actions she has been taking?

River sighs, ever since she got out of the Library, her life has been a continuous line of _what ifs._

No, she can’t ignore the Discordia. No matter how she wishes to walk away and leave Melak trapped forever in that timeless planet. They have already changed the past, her actions are crucial to eradicate their threat once and for all.

That thought makes her laugh out loud. _Oh, God, I can hold the psychopath title any longer, can I? When I became this selfless?_

Her phone rings again and River sighs before picking up. _I’m going to regret this._ “Yes, Jemima?”

“How did you know it was me?”

“Lucky guess, I guess you wanted to talk to me?”

* * *

Losing hope shouldn’t be something that happens to a woman that literally came back from being a damn ghost.

But after Manhattan, River can’t help it to do it, every time that something goes wrong. Every time that she has to repeat a terrible experience because there is simply not another way, every time that she has to watch someone die.

The Discordia come because of course they do and Melak fixes his vendetta on her just like the first time. Petty and stupid. Yes, that is no news either. Jemima dies. Gammarae dies helping her and Spod to escape. Spod sacrifices himself to protect River and the sting of the things she can’t change grow sharper and sharper. Whoever said once that repeating things would make you less susceptible when they happened was a fool. Because River can’t pretend that it doesn’t affect her when Melak rains chaos across the cosmos just to get to her. She can’t pretend that every jump through the vortex doesn’t feel like something is tearing her apart from inside.

She can’t pretend that she doesn’t want the Doctor with her at that moment nor can’t stop his name coming from her lips in a plea for help.

Just like that second time in Lake Silencio ages ago, foreknowledge doesn’t guarantee an easy way away of the pain.

And when he appears, that Doctor, that very young, very happy and ridiculous Doctor. With his scarf and his sweet words and that life that they lived together but she can’t remember. River thinks _what if_ again.

What if she just stops? What if this corrupted timeline becomes her home? What if she just tells the Doctor that they can form some elaborate plan to defeat the Discordia without changing everything? What if she stops being the woman that escaped the Library, the woman that is fighting an impossible fight against time itself and just sits down and becomes that woman that the Doctor is describing?

She could do it for both of them, maybe in this timeline, the Time War wouldn’t happen. Maybe her Doctor would grow older and older but without its scars, without losing hope, maybe they can be together, linearly, properly.

Oh, it’s so tempting, during these moments, while Dante brags about River being his bride. So, tempting to just keep things like they are, another Area 52, but this time the temptation is over her head.

Even when she knows that woman is not her. All those sweet memories he describes with such fondness, River doesn’t have them.

Even when she knows this Doctor is not the man she fell in love with. No matter how good would be the intention, she would be changing his whole life when he didn’t change hers. Just like she had told him: _Not one line._

And deep down, she knows that it’s that she loves him. That him. Scars and all.

And she knows it’s reciprocated.

“For a while,” she reassures to this very young, very scared Doctor. “I come back.”

For some reason, it’s easier than the first time.[4]

* * *

River is packing for her next expedition when she hears the wheezing of the TARDIS inside her flat. A smile forms on her face, a younger Doctor wouldn't come directly to her place.

A lanky pair of arms hold her from behind. Oh, definitely not young.

“Hi, honey, I’m home,” he murmurs in her ear.

“And what sort of time you call this?” River turns around kisses him, the Doctor’s hands go to her waist but she pulls back. _Diaries._ “When are we, sweetie?”

“I have done Manhattan,” he says, his voice low and she looks at him up and down. He is not wearing the tweed anymore, but the purple frock coat that she had seen him use the rest of the time after her parents’ deaths. “Three weeks since the last time I saw you.”

Three weeks. Not six months, like the last time they saw each other before Darillium. Good, so they still have a little more time together. Or has she changed anything else?

“It has been a year for me,” River closes her suitcase and takes her vortex manipulator.

“I’m sorry.”

“No matter, sweetie,” River says and takes her jacket. “Here, let’s go.” She takes his hand and starts to walk to the TARDIS, but the Doctor stops her.

“Wait, _wait_ , River, weren’t you packing?” River turns at her bed and the suitcase. “If you have plans…”

“Since when you care about that?” she laughs a little too loud. “We have a time machine, sweetie. And you always pull me from my expeditions.”

“And you always complain because the TARDIS gets us a little late,” he says touching her nose.

“That’s because you don’t let me drive!” River sing-songs. “Don’t worry, sweetie, it’s not an important expedition.” _And I already know how it is going to end anyway._

“Isn’t it?” he asks, his tone hopeful.

“Yes, just getting some relics from a system away. I can tell Anita to go in my place, she owes me one.” River hooks his arm with her own and tries to not notice that he flinches at the name.

“Right, then!” The Doctor gets his usual smile back. “Come along, wife.”

River can’t help the bright smile that forms on her face when they enter inside the TARDIS and The Doctor starts bouncing around the TARDIS. Sometimes she gets that warm feeling, — more so than in her first time — that feeling of being eighty again. Running around with her husband across time and space and just stopping on Stormcage to sleep or take a shower. Those days where she wasn’t worried if they would ever be in sync again.

“Where are we going?” she asks him.

“Oh, you’ll see,” he says with a smirk. “This man, Curtix, I helped him with a Judoon problem decades ago from his perspective and he contacted me a few days ago saying that he wants me to attend the inauguration of their restaurant.”

“I can’t believe you actually answered that phone,” River rolls her eyes.

“Oi, don’t be mean, River, we can actually have dinner out without interruptions.” The TARDIS’ wheezing sound announces their arrival. River has given up on him taking off the breaks, _decades_ ago, and now she kind of finds the sound comforting.

“A dinner out without interruptions?” She laughs and follows him to the door. “Sweetie, you know that’s basically impossible.”

“So little faith, Professor Song. Ha!” The Doctor opens the door. “Here we are.”

River can’t help the barking laugh that comes out of her when they step outside to a rocky and clearly primitive place.

“What? This isn’t…” The Doctor sighs in frustration and River keeps laughing, looking around at the place. She can see smoke coming from a place not far away. Oh, she recognizes the place, her hand goes over the Doctor’s forearm.

“Sweetie, I think we should go back to the TARDIS.”

“Don’t you think we should look around?” The Doctor says and turns around to the TARDIS, rolling his eyes. “She brought us here because we needed too, didn’t you, Old Girl?”

“Alright, you can continue this lovely domestic discussion inside, you two.” River deadpans dragging him to the TARDIS. “Darling, we _really_ need to go.”

“But why? Do you know this planet? It seems quite primitive.”

“Well, yes!” River snaps as she can already see people coming from the village. “Archaeologist, sweetie, remember? And on this planet they like to sacrifice the outlanders to their Rain Gods. We need to go now!”

She starts laughing again when they are safely back on the TARDIS, The Doctor closes his arms and pouts, looking up at the time machine’s ceiling as if he is actually having a quarrel with her.

“Are you going to let me drive this time?” River smirks while taking the controls.

“She clearly likes you more than me.”

“Oh, sweetie, don’t say that. She only likes to prank you a bit.”

“I bet you wouldn’t be saying that if we’d had been sacrificed right now.”

 _Well, no, I didn’t._ “Fair point. Can we go where we’re supposed too now?”

The Doctor raises his hands in surrender and River shakes her head as she checks the coordinates in the console.

* * *

They get to the restaurant on time. The dinner results to be actually accident-free except for the rain that catches up with them on their way to the TARDIS, like a little nod from the universe of what it had changed.

It feels like a little gift, this little week they have. A parenthesis in between the big events that are to come. River wonders if the universe just decides what is and is not important enough to change. Manhattan was too big, the Discordia too. _Maybe the timelines are easing,_ River thinks on that week that they spent laughing, making love, saving planets. _Maybe there is time._

“You seem quite happy today, Professor,” Anita comments one day. They are deep in an ancient mine, digging up inside to see if, like some of the stories say, the rest of a hidden temple lay inside.

“Why wouldn’t I be happy, Anita?” River quips and tries to keep herself steady as they cross inside the slippery tunnel. “We have been making marvellous progress with this or at least we are not dead by any poisonous gas yet. And I am probably having a date soon. It’s a good day for me!”

Anita laughs and clings to River’s jacket to keep her balance. “Why would they hide a temple in a mine? That I never understood.”

“Oh, c’mon, Anita, I thought you read my book about this tribe!” River says. “The Enac conquered the Gnalopes and forced them into slavery in these mines. On top of that, they also had to renounce their old gods. So, they built— Oh, careful!” She stops when Anita almost falls behind her. “They built their temples here in the mines, where they knew their masters would never come.”

“Oh, the power of using snobbery in your favour, I love that.”

They reach the end of the tunnel and River smiles, she had travelled back to the time that the mines were still open just to be sure that she and Anita weren’t walking into a death trap.

The place is still quite well conservated, the idols and little monuments placed on the stone tables.

“Oh, my God,” Anita exclaims. “I don’t know how you always do it.”

“I told you we dug in the right place,” River smirks at her. “C’mon, grab your bag. I know you can’t smell it, but I can and we have little time to take all the nice things we can carry.”

“Professor, would you be offended if I tell you something?”

“Not at all, dear!”

“Sometimes I kind of hate how you’re always right.”

River laughs. “Don’t worry, I get that all the time. Now, to work!”

They take the relics in record time, finishing just when River’s head starts spinning and she feels the stink of the nausea. She sighs of relief when they finally cross the tunnel and then they are lifted up to the surface. But before she can go and receive the warm clapping of the crew she is bending over and throwing up her breakfast.

Heightened senses can definitely have their problems.

“You’re heading back to Luna, then?” Anita asks her later when they are back in their tents.

“Mmhm?” River takes the wet cloth out of her eyes. “Yes, I suppose, I have to write my reports about this.”

“You never stay in one place, Professor,” the young woman smiles, resting back in her chair. “You really like that, don’t you? Being the mysterious figure that jumps in and out of different ages on the campus.”

“There is no enjoyment in living a long, _long_ life like mine if you can’t become a legend, Anita.” _And there are some legends that I prefer to be remembered the most._

“I read your books, you know,” Anita comments, “the ones about the Weeping Angels were my favourites.”

“Everyone has a fascination with the deadly, I suppose.”

 _“The Dream Child_ made me cry, actually,” Anita says and River turns around, surprised. “The part where Katherine finds out that her parents just… Adopted this other girl and named her with her birth name. It was quite upsetting. Her rant to them was quite satisfying.”

“How did you know it was me?” River asks, startled that a blush starts to color her face. “I published under a pseudonym.”

“Well, apart from the fact that there has been a rumour for quite some time… Professor; the information about the Weeping Angels in that book wasn’t made clear fifty years after its publication. Information that came in your other book.”

“And I thought that I was being discreet,” River laughs.

“In your favour, when I met you, I never imagined that you were a writer of fiction.”

“I am not,” River shrugs and waves her hand. “It was just a pastime I did while I was travelling with an old friend.”

“Still mysterious,” Anita chuckles. “Call me poetic but I found a little too much soul in that book, Professor. Why did you choose archeology?”

“For the money and shiny things.” River scoffs and is relieved when Anita starts laughing too, leaving the conversation behind. Back in the Library, Anita had become one of her best friends and this kind of conversations would have been the norm. But now, Anita is alive, just a young, recently graduated doctor before she gets to be a ghost in the Library.

 _No, don’t think about that,_ River tells herself. _Don’t think about that yet._

Even before they are back in Luna, her team is worried that River caught some virus or breathed a toxic gas during the excavation. No matter how many times she tells them that she is not human and that the gas wouldn’t be deadly for her as it would be for them, it’s true that nausea doesn’t stop and that she feels more tired than normal. But even when she dismisses their worries as exaggerated, River still promises that she will get a check-up before their expedition with Lux Corporations.

 _I have quite the time to do it anyway,_ she thinks, _never make a promise of how much with a time traveller, people._

It’s waking up a week later feeling sick again that finally makes her give up and get her medical droid to run a diagnosis. She can’t get sick again, can she? Last time it had been mostly exhaustion and her recent excavations had been mild…

She freezes when the droid gives the diagnosis.

“What? No, that’s not possible, run it again,” she says, trying to not shake.

The results are the same and at the same time, River hears someone knock the door.

“You must be malfunctioning,” she hisses. “Coming!” she shouts at the door’s way and turns around. “Run it again, it's not possible.”

“I have no malfunction detected, Professor Song,” the droid says in an annoyingly calm voice. “The results are correct, you…”

“Stop it,” River shuts down the droid and goes to answer the door. Her hearts give a sharp jump when she sees The Doctor in front of her, wearing his tuxedo and a top hat. “Hello, sweetie,” she manages to whisper but she can’t stop looking at him up and down. _No, it can’t be now. Not yet._

“River, are you alright? You’re very pale.” The Doctor cups her face in his hands. River blinks and shakes her head stepping away from the doorstep.

“I’m fine! I’m fine, sweetie, come in, where are we?” River practically runs to get her diary so he can’t see her face.

“The Planet of the Rain Gods? That’s when last saw you,” The Doctor says and she takes a deep breath forcing herself to smile as she turns around.

“In sync at last, then.”

She kisses him to make the panic running in her body go away, trying to make it as slow as possible. Ridiculous, really, either of them wanting to go slow at this point. But when he responds the same way she knows that it is, for this night it is.

“So, why the fancy clothes, sweetie?” she asks when they separate. “Are we going out?”

“Yes, I reserved us a place at the Singing Towers of Darillium,” her husband says and this time, without the blind excitement that had clouded her vision, she can see the tightness on that smile. She forces herself to smile too.

“Aren’t you going to cancel this time?” River tries to joke but the seriousness on The Doctor’s face makes her knees weak.

“No,” he says lowering his eyes but putting on the smile again as he bare arms up and down. “No, this time is for real, wife. Get dressed, we don’t want to be late.”

“We have a time machine, sweetie,” River says and heads up to the bathroom.

She almost falls down against the sink when the wave of nausea makes her gag. She looks at her own pale reflection in the mirror and takes several deep breaths. Her parenthesis is over. Now the night that once had been one of the happiest moments of her life has come like a storm, tearing down the little peace she had found. And what the droid had said… No. No, the droid must be mistaken. It has to be.

River takes a deep breath, clenching her jaw. She can’t let it overpower her now, not when she needs to keep her foreknowledge from The Doctor.

Because she needs to be strong this night too, for both their sakes.

Because the clock has started ticking.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1. This follows from the end of the audio story _Lies in Ruins_ , Bernice and River do know each other, Benny being her teacher on Luna. And Eight was in a bad state during the whole episode, sounded like he would break down during the whole thing... And he did. LOL, poor fella.[return to text]
> 
> 2. I doubt that River ever met the War Doctor, he was in a convulted time and space event and the closet River got to his timeline (if she did, it can be that it was when Eight was still alive) was during _Concealed Weapon._ Also, the actor passed away, so... For now, figures about it.[return to text]
> 
> 3. River means the expedition that she did in _Concealead Weapon_ were the War Master hipnotised her to believe all her collages had died and deleted the tracks of his plans. Naturally she doesn't remember here either.[return to text]
> 
> 4. For people that don't listen, everything in this scene is River's fight with her arc villains, the Discordia, in Series 4 of _The Diary of River Song._ [return to text]
> 
> [BTS/glorified author's note.](https://ambitious-witch.tumblr.com/post/188835441868/from-silence-to-melody-bts)
> 
> ... This was supposed to be a Breather Chapter, to give you all a rest before the chapters and chapters of angst. LOL. I failed miserably. So... Darillium, next chapter. This time the double of pain, prepare the tissues.


	6. The Towers

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Can I ask you something?”
> 
> “Hmm?”
> 
> “Why did you want me to bring you here?” River frowns at the question and turns to face him. “I mean, you could have come any time you liked but you always asked me to take you— ”
> 
> “... And you always cancelled.” River arches and eyebrow and The Doctor inhales deeply and gives a sad smile.
> 
> “But I kept the promise at the end, didn’t I?” Once upon a time, River would have thought that that question was a plea for reassurance, but now she can catch the bitterness in his tone. The way that he seems resigned but his arms still hold her tighter than ever. She turns around and rests her head on his shoulder, she can give him at least that.
> 
> “Yeah, you did.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, here comes one of the key moments! Thank you for the comments! This chapter I certainly enjoyed to write, I have a really bad relationship with its canon counterpart. You know, when I started watching Doctor Who about... A year and half ago, I think, I started with Twelve's era and I instantly shipped Twelve/Clara and when I watched THORS and River (who I barely knew who it was and was mentioned just... once? In two series?) made her appearance with zero foreshadowings, I was like: "Huh, okay? I guess? This kind of underwhelming compared with the sheer, raw emotions of the three previous episodes but... Whatever, I guess, I will probably understand it when I watch the rest."
> 
> And then I did watch the rest of the Doctors. Eleven being my last and my favourite and Eleven/River becoming another OTP. Then I watched THORS again and was like: Oh. _Oh..._ I kind of hate this episode now?
> 
> I think that it's the only episode where I actually got angry at Moffat's writing. But not like, the crazy haters angry, more like: "I know that you can write better than this" angry. THORS simply is inedible for me because it destroys Eleven's character integrity, throws Clara under the bus... All for fifty minutes of fanservice that don't even improve the character it's so desperate to prop up. I tried rewatching it to warm up at it but I failed, mostly because at that time I had already entered in the fandom and discovered that THORS is basically The Bible for the Characterization of River Song and The Doctor's Relationship(TM). Which just irritated me more and made all those rewatches ended up being me drinking tea with a frustrated expression and thinking: " _Mmmm,_ this episode tastes like tone dissonance."
> 
> So, forgive me if I throw shade to every aspect of it in this chapter. Because I'm petty.
> 
>  **Music for this chapter:** [_The Scent of Love_](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wCvquy_BXeU) from _The Piano._

* * *

Centuries ago, River had considered Darillium one of the best nights of her entire life. The Doctor had promised to take her for ages and always cancelled at the last minute. She was amazed by the beauty of them and dwelled on the singers’ celestial voices, except for the moment when The Doctor had suddenly started crying. That night had been full of blissful ignorance and happiness.

Now she is under the spray of her shower, trying to control her breathing and letting the hot water wash her tears. It feels like something is crushing her, the weight of the timelines crushing her like a pile of rocks over her back. She can’t stop now, she can’t smile and ask him to take her to another place, she has seen the determination in his eyes. And she remembers it, anyway. She remembers this night even though the date might be different.

She hears a knock on the door. “Honey? Is everything alright?”

“Hmm? Yes! Yes!” River says, turning off the spray. “I’m fine, sweetie, I’ll be ready in ten minutes.”

“Okay.” River sighs when she hears him walk away, getting out of the shower to dry up. God, she left the droid in the living room. Hopefully, The Doctor won’t get his hands on it.

When she leaves the bathroom, The Doctor isn’t there, she looks around and sees a wrapped dress lying on one of the chairs. The ‘old’ green dress, looking brand new and ready to use. The droid is in the same place she left it apparently untouched, which makes River sigh with relief as she takes it to her room.

She runs the test again, this time putting the machine’s voice off, the result is the same and River nearly kicks it in a fit of rage. Shaking her head and murmuring about stupid machines, she prepares for the night.

He has brought the green dress, of course, he had the first time. River dresses up quite quickly and combs her curls with her hands.

 _You have to control yourself,_ she chastises herself. _He can’t know what you know, remember? This night especially, you have to be as happily ignorant as you can._

She is finishing her makeup when she hears the TARDIS’ door open again. The Doctor comes out of it and smiles. “Ready?”

River nods, taking his arm. “Can’t wait!”

The TARDIS hums as they enter and River feels a calming sensation through her telepathic connection. _Do you know which night is this?_ She asks her second mother. _Do you know what is supposed to happen, Old Girl?_

She looks at The Doctor typing over the console with a weirdly serious precision that contrasted with his normal spinning around.

“I tried to get the best places I could in a year where the towers weren’t so crowded,” he says, “but I don’t think it would be the same if we go to an empty space either. Alright, should be here.”

The TARDIS stops wheezing and The Doctor opens the door. River can hear him sigh, frustrated. “For Rassilon’s sake…”

River steps out behind him and sees the big tree and the brilliant sky. “Calderon Beta. This is the planet of the chip shops, that one you brought me after our wedding.”

“Yeah, apparently,” The Doctor says, distracted and walking around the TARDIS.

“I thought we were going to Darillium,” River tries to keep the hope out of her voice and make it sound like exasperation. _Please let this be another false alarm. Another night he cancels._

But then she walks around the place, sees the other TARDIS parked close to theirs and understands why. She remembers this, stumbling in a younger TARDIS, seeing that younger Doctor.

 _She is trying to keep the timeline intact._ The discovery fills her with a sudden sense of doom and bitterness, of course, the TARDIS wouldn’t try to override it, not even for River. Why would she anyway? The time machine had done everything to preserve River’s timeline since the moment her mother met The Doctor and probably before that.

 _She sees all time and space at the same time,_ River thinks, smiling bitterly. _For her you’re dead and you are alive at the same time... just like for him._

Taking a deep breath, she opens the door of the younger TARDIS and makes her best seductive smile. “Oh, you nostalgic idiot, you just can’t keep away, can’t you?” The younger Doctor turns around, looking at her and then at the dress strung up close to the console. “Doctor? Why have you brought another one of these? Who else is here?”

The young Doctor turns around to the dress and then back at her again. “River, could you just check the light on top? I think the bulb needs changing.”

“The bulb?” She asks, trying to not roll her eyes. The Doctor nods and she turns around, stepping out of the TARDIS and waits a few minutes while the voices of her younger self and her husband argue inside.

It’s when she hears her Doctor approaching that she opens the door again. “The light’s fine, I don’t know what you’re talking about…”

Her Doctor rushes behind her. “No River! Wrong TARDIS, I’m parked around back - younger version.”

“Two of you! The mind races, does it not?” She looks at both versions of The Doctor, trying to keep her voice as genuine as possible.

Her Doctor touches her arm. “Come on, we’ll be late.”

“He’s taking me to the Singing Towers of Darillium!” River says loudly as she walks out, in a tone that sounds almost comical. “He’s been promising for ages!”

She rests her back on the wall once she is back in the TARDIS, breathing slowly to control the sob that threatens to come out. Stars, what a ridiculous situation. Once upon a time, she had been so used to faking something for the sake of a timeline but now she can barely hold on. It seems that age has affected her ability to lie.

The Doctor comes back and walks directly to the console. “Alright, she shall work now. Won’t you, Old Girl? This is a special night.”

River suppresses the urge to scoff at his tone, surprisingly excited. The Doctor is definitely not losing his own deceiving power. How frustrating.

“Are you okay?” He has turned around at River now and she straightens her back, her playful smile back in her lips.

“Never better, sweetie.”

* * *

The Singing Towers of Darillium are as beautiful as she remembers: enormous buildings made of black rock that confront each other, inside the structure has tubes and windows were the wind blows and that allows the music to travel across the distance between them.

The Doctor parks the TARDIS outside the first tower since the force field around the place don't allow any capsule to go near the towers.

"They say that the force field makes the music more clear since it's not lost the open," she explains to The Doctor when they get out of the TARDIS.

"Oh," The Doctor said. "I thought they just did it to protect the singers."

"You didn't know?" River asks surprised, normally The Doctor would gather all the knowledge he could for their dates to impress her.

The Doctor shakes his head. "I just came to get invitations and that was around a century ago. The force field wasn't that strong. And I didn't ask."

River just nods but she can feel the tension on his body when she takes his arm as they enter the first tower.

The outside of the tower pales of how beautiful the inside is: the building it's incredibly tall almost fifty floors and the inside is filled with people already, getting in their seats in the balconies or the floating seats that are towards the sides of the structure.

"Good evening," a man greets them in the hall. River barely pays attention to him. Her eyes fixed in the singers already getting in the highest places and the beautifully painted windows. "Mr and Mrs Song, yes?"

"Yes, we had an… old reservation," The Doctor says and gives a card to the man. The host passes it for a scanner.

"Well, it all seems to be in order," the host says when the device dings. "Follow me, please, I will take you to your balcony."

The balconies are the more expensive seats to take since they are the ones that allow the people to see the second tower. The one where they are guided too it's in the middle and facing directly to the other tower.

"Enjoy the concert," the host says and River and The Doctor give a mechanic 'thank you'.

River walks ahead, resting her body on the railing. She looks down below and sees the people gathering in the gardens that surround the towers. The Doctor steps closer and hugs her from behind.

“What do you think?” he asks. “Are they like you imagined?”

River chuckles and leans against him. “The music hasn’t started yet, sweetie.”

“Can I ask you something?”

“Hmm?”

“Why did you want me to bring you here?” River frowns at the question and turns to face him. “I mean, you could have come any time you liked but you always asked me to take you— ”

“... And you always cancelled.” River arches and eyebrow and The Doctor inhales deeply and gives a sad smile.

“But I kept the promise at the end, didn’t I?” Once upon a time, River would have thought that that question was a plea for reassurance, but now she can catch the bitterness in his tone. The way that he seems resigned but his arms still hold her tighter than ever. She turns around and rests her head on his shoulder, she can give him at least that.

“Yeah, you did.”

Then the music starts.

The first singer is close, probably a few feet away, but her voice is as light as a breeze and slowly the others join, slow and steady, filling every corner of the tower with melody. There are no instruments, just voices drowning everything like water.

And then the voices on the other tower join them in response, they travel in the air like stardust in space and even when River had their music recorded in the depths of her memory for centuries; its beauty still leaves her without breath. She takes another and tries to resist the urge of sobbing, so it comes out like a half laugh, half sob.

“It’s beautiful,” she says because there is nothing else to say. Or is it? Because what else can she do now? They are at the end of the line and her… And her…

“Yeah.” The Doctor’s voice sounds low and tight when he untangles his arms off her and walks away. River sees him squeezing his eyes and hastily trying to clean the trail of tears off his face. He doesn’t look at her, just rests his weight on the railing and breathes deeply and River thinks he has never looked older than at this moment.

“Sorry,” he mutters and passes his hand over his face again. “So sorry, I’m being an idiot.” He lets out a little laugh.

“Sweetie…” River starts, feeling the tears pinch her eyes.

“Hey, hey, I’m alright,” he wraps his arms around her, River presses one of her hands against his chest, feeling his hearts beating quickly under her fingers. “This night is for you, okay? Don’t let me ruin it, I was just…” he swallows another sob and presses his lips over her curls. “I was being a sentimental old man, that’s all.”

 _No, it’s not,_ River thinks. _It has never been just that._

It hadn’t been just that the first time and it’s not now. It’s their last time, the end of their line for him. But what can she do?

 _You could tell him,_ that rebel voice inside her head says. _You could tell him you get out of the Library, ask him to help you. End this torment for both of you._

_No, I can’t. What if…?_

_What if?_

“Doctor...?” she starts, tears running down her face. Stars, she has cried more this last year than in an entire lifetime.

“Hmm?”

River takes a deep breath.

_Tell him._

_Tell him and end all this._

“I’m pregnant.”

The words come out of her mouth unwillingly, but she can’t stop them once they are formed and said. She feels The Doctor tense as if she had stabbed him, he lets her go and stares at her in shock.

“What?” The question comes from him as a whisper and from her own head like a scream. Why did she do that? Why? She was going to tell him about the Library and—

And she can’t.

She can’t, it’s too uncertain, too dangerous.

And yet she just said this… Almost a fight with her own unconscious. One secret for another.

“I’m pregnant,” she repeats, almost as surprised at the words as he is. She remembers the droid’s results, those annoyingly precise 52th-century results.

_Results positive: early stages of pregnancy._

_Seven weeks._

“Are you sure?” The Doctor’s voice sounds tight and he seems about to hyperventilate. Not that she blames him, her own hands are trembling while she is holding herself against him.

“Yeah,” River exhales the words and feels like a weight is lifted from her shoulders. A small one, compared with the other, but a lift anyway. “I have been feeling poorly these last few weeks so I made a test with my medical droid and… that’s what I got. I can hardly believe it myself.”

There was probably a time where she would have believed it. Back then when she was young and had thought that in their future they had time. Back then when she had been too scared to ask him if he wanted to… with her.

And now here they are.

The universe seems to really love a good laugh.

“Doctor?” River wants her voice to sound demanding, to shake him out of his shock. But it’s just like that time in Asgard: meek, doubtful. He had told her what had happened with his children and River had never really asked him if he…[1]

Well, it’s not like it isn’t a surprise for her either.

Maybe she shouldn’t have told him… No, not even River could have thought about something that cruel. But…

The thought vanishes when The Doctor kisses her. He grabs the nape of her neck and smashes his lips against hers because, for him, the words must be obsolete too. Because she can feel the desperation and the words _don’t go_ trying to come out as they cling to each other. But he won’t say them. He can’t, just as she couldn’t.

River cups his cheek when they separate, rubbing the trail of tears on it; the old ones and the new. The Doctor takes a shaky breath and kisses her forehead roughly, wrapping in a crushing hug.

"Sweetie, you're crushing me."

"Sorry! Sorry," he says, easing the pressure and smiles.

"Are you okay?"

"I should be the one asking that."

"It's just that you… Blacked out for a second."

"That? I was just surprised. I didn't expect—" he shakes his head and puts his hands over his shoulders. "I'm fine. Are you fine? That's the most important thing. How are you? Do you… Do you want this?"

"Yeah." River can't make up a lie just like she couldn't keep this inside her. She had wanted it, a family with him, whether they _could_ be an entirely different matter. "And I am fine, sweetie. Well, aside from nausea and the tiredness, everything is okay for us."

 _Us,_ that word feels so strange and yet so natural. A smile forms in her face by instinct. _Not even ten minutes accepting it and I am already using the word us._

"Well," the Doctor hugs her again, hiding his face on her hair, "that's good. That’s brilliant."

River can feel his hands trembling on her back.

They stay like that for a while, just holding each other as the music of the towers continues, then The Doctor is the first to break the embrace.

"I think we should go eat something," he says. "I'm hungry. Are you hungry? The towers don't have restaurants, sadly. We'll have to take the Old Girl to one."

"Let me drive this time," River quips, "I will get us before you give up to her jests and we'll end up being chased or eating inside her."

"Whatever you want tonight," The Doctor shrugs and River snorts.

"Since when you spoil me, sweetie?"

"It's just tonight, River Song," he took her arm gently. "C'mon, let's go before the people start to gather."

* * *

River takes them to her favourite restaurant: a small place in the 1920s and by some miracle, nothing blows up. They end up dancing after she teased The Doctor about his lack of dancing skills. To prove a point, he takes her hand and drags her to the dance floor.

The song is mercifully slow, the singer has a sweet, flowing voice and for a moment, River just allows herself to truly relax and forget the spoilers for a moment. Her head falls on The Doctor’s shoulder as they move with the music.

“I didn’t step on your feet yet,” he whispers in her ear.

“Hmm, that’s excellent,” River deadpans. “It only took you three decades to coordinate those gangly limbs of yours.”

The Doctor scoffs and plants a kiss on her neck, making River yelp. “Doctor, remember which century we’re in!”

“River Song, shy? I never thought I would live to see something like that.”

“Wait till we’re in the TARDIS and I’ll show you who is _shy_ ,” River hisses. “We are in the twenties, sweetie.”

“I’m quite sure that nothing I do can generate more attention than your dress, dear.” The Doctor rolls his eyes.

“You love this dress,” River snaps back. “And I also like nice things, sweetie, the clothes of this decade look like potato sacks.”

The Doctor bursts into laughter and she can’t help but follow him too. The people on the dance floor indeed eye them, but River doesn’t care. She wraps her hand around The Doctor’s and in minutes they are out in the street walking to the TARDIS.

“Where do you want to go now?” He asks as they get back into the time machine. “Back to Darillium?”

“Do _you_ want to go back?” River arches an eyebrow not missing the bitterness of his tone when he says the planet’s name. The Doctor shrugs, his eyes avoiding her.

“Well, you wanted to go for so long,” he says, “and we didn’t finish the concert.”

“Honey, the concerts in Darillium last for weeks, we can’t stay that long,” River explains. “Besides, as beautiful as it is, an actual season of concerts goes for years. Do you know that a single night on that planet lasts twenty-four years? We would die of boredom before the season finishes. The Singing Towers are a dream, but the rest of the planet is like Calderon Beta and their chip shops.”

River is not as surprised at his reaction as The Doctor is with her words. Maybe years ago, a younger River would have wanted to explore that dark planet anyway, find whatever could make it interesting in her eyes even when The Doctor would start to claim that it wasn’t. But she, ironically, doesn’t have time for that and quite honestly, now that the clock is ticking faster and faster, she’d rather find a solution for her problem or die trying instead of just prolonging the agony for a few decades out of fear. She wants a life for real, away from the fear of the Library. Another little parenthesis in a place like Darillium would feel cheap if she has to go again. She can’t run anymore.

“I also have an expedition, we sail in a ship next week,” she continues, looking at The Doctor instantly tense with the words. “And if this might be our last night in sync for a long time, it’s rather better spent it at home, don’t you think?”

“Yeah.”

She walks to him and wraps her arms around him. The Doctor relaxes and hugs her back, pressing his chin over her curls. He is really trying, River can’t deny it, they are both hiding damage now.

River is the one to kiss him this time, her hands getting under his jacket and running over his back. The Doctor slides his hands over her waist and goes up to caress the skin of her back and behind her neck.

“Who is shy now?” she hisses against his mouth.

“Not me,” he says, dropping to kiss and bite her neck.

“Me neither,” the words come out of her with a moan.

“I guess we are too old for that.”

“Oh, sweetie,” River lets out a little laugh, “you _definitely_ are.”

When they make it to their room, The Doctor’s jacket and waistcoat have been dropped somewhere on the way to the console, along with River’s bra and shoes, her dress down to her waist.

River clings to him as she takes off his bow-tie and unbuttons his dress shirt. She feels like they could go slow and at the same time, she can feel the timelines already beating in the back of her mind. _One night, it’s just one last night._

 _No,_ she thinks, a moan coming from her mouth when he brushes his lips over one of her breasts. _It won’t be the last._

River pulls The Doctor against her then, making them fall over the bed and laughing at his surprise when she wraps her legs around his hips, rocking against him and making him choke a breath against her neck. The Doctor gets himself up to not crush her and plants open-mouthed kisses over her collarbone, lifting her dress up to take it off her.

River kneels and pulls her arms up, allowing him to throw the green dress to the other side of the bed, then she puts a hand on the nape of his neck and smashes her lips on his, inhaling a shaky breath when The Doctor’s hand teases inside her knickers.

She pulls his shirt down and takes it off him. "You're wearing too many clothes."

"You are wearing too little."

“Then let’s mend that, shall we?”

Moments later, they are both laying naked in the bed, face to face, skin to skin: River pressing kisses down The Doctor’s jaw and him caressing the inside of her tights. A moan escapes from her mouth when he starts pressing his fingers inside her body and River sinks her teeth into his shoulder.

Whatever words she had thought to say before, to comfort him, to comfort herself or maybe to keep the pretence that she is scared that this will actually be their last night again - those words die under the heat of the moment. They become flashes inside her mind, locked doors and closed drawers that she saves for later. This moment becomes her only focus even when she breaks apart with a breathless cry.

It’s incredibly sad how their minds have to be apart during such an intimate act. That even when they are finally intertwined there has to be a form of self-control to avoid anything slipping.

River tries to keep her eyes open then, locking her eyes with his to at least not let any emotion getaway. Her hands tangle in The Doctor’s hair as they rock against each other. The Doctor hooks one of her legs over his hip and thrusts harder, hiding his face on the crook her neck when River arches at the change of angle. She tries to get him to look at her again, but the pressure in her lower belly it’s too much to her do anything but arch and move against him.

When ecstasy reaches her, River falls apart with a sob, her eyes closed as everything she can see and feel are the things that she can’t say right now. The Doctor follows her just after, his face still pressed against her neck. She holds him then, caressing his back as they get their breath back and The Doctor lifts his head and cups one of her cheeks, leaving little kisses all over her face.

They stay in bed for a while after that, just each other below the blankets. Even in the TARDIS, River can feel the hours going away, their night ending with every second that passes. The Doctor draws words in Gallifreyan over her skin and River smiles at every one of them as if he is saying them out loud. River keeps herself the closest she can against his skin, knowing that now he wouldn't let any thought slip even by accident.

His silence worries her, the first time The Doctor had kept his facade the whole time and even asked about her next expedition, now he seems out of words.

“Doctor?” she asks.

“Hmm?”

“Are you well?”

“Are you?” He asks back.

“Of course I am, my love,” River takes one of his hands from over her waist and kisses it. “Happiest night of my life.” It’s the truth and a lie at the same time, she feels it both ways.

The Doctor quiets again, one hand still holding River and the other going up and down her torso to rest slightly over her belly. She hears him take a deep breath and closes her eyes.

“You know I love you, right?” The words come strangled against her curls and River takes a sharp breath, she opens her mouth to say something but the Doctor squeezes against her shaking his head. “No, listen, I know I’m rubbish at showing it sometimes and I know that you have probably spent more time with my younger selves than me. But they are not _me_ , River.”

“They pretty much are, sweetie.”

“No, I didn’t mean that, I…” The Doctor sighs and moves up to face her. “They don’t know you, not yet, not as I do. They are not done, they are not… Finished yet. And whatever stupid or hurtful thing I say then, none of that changes what I feel for you now, okay? I need to know you know that.”

River blinks, surprised by his words, she remembers him saying something similar before but in that time the words had been buried under her own feelings when every incarnation that she had encountered after just got younger and younger. Now she really notices the tone of them, the mix of love for her and hate for himself, for the years that he didn’t know her or distrusted her. She thinks about all the times she thought the same, all the times she stayed up thinking of how her younger and more dangerous selves could have taken him away if something just changed if the TARDIS had landed in another place if the poison had been quicker than her.

“Of course I know, Doctor,” she says, her voice strangled. “Always and completely. A hundred years haven’t changed that.”

The River that had done Darillium the first time had barely reacted to his words in the long term, too deep in thinking that hiding everything, even happiness was the best option. But she knows there is no time for that.

Or maybe it’s the contrary, this time they might have time.

And she can’t waste it in that.

The rest of the morning, they try it to expend it as normal as possible — if normal has ever being a word appropriate for anything they do — they shower and have breakfast while and River changes in more comfortable clothes while packing a bag for her next expedition.

When The Doctor gives her the screwdriver, River freezes for a minute. She had cursed that device while her time as a data ghost, almost as much as she had cursed The Doctor for keeping that little piece of her inside it.

And for that second that she stares it, the feeling comes back. _Ghost. Freak. Paradox._ But then she smiles and takes it. No, she won't let those doubts creep on her ever again. She is alive, she has another live beating inside. Ghosts can't create life, they are just a leftover of it.

"It's not necessary, Doctor," she says, rolling the screwdriver between her fingers.

"Take it as another present, with the Towers," he says, his light tone is _almost_ convincing but his eyes burn with resentment when looking at the screwdriver. "I see you're not carrying so many blasters anymore."

"Well, what can I say?" River closes the sip of her bag. "You're a bad influence."

"For you, River Song? Always."

She tucks the bag over her shoulder and starts walking to the console room.

“Will you go back to Luna?” he asks her and she turns around, fixing his untied bow tie with a cheeky smile.

"Oh, no, I don't want to waste time, this trip it's too exciting to delay." The Doctor gives her a tight smile, he is thinking that she is talking about the Library, but no, there is still time for that. She has a lot of meddling to do.

She kisses him then, telling herself that it won't be the last. The Doctor, on the other hand, kneels down and presses a kiss on her belly. The gesture startles her for a moment but then she let's go a tearful laugh and tangles her fingers on his hair, making him raise up to kiss him again.

"I love you," he says, cupping her face.

"I love you too. Always and completely."

"Please call me, River, okay? Whenever you're in a helpless situation. You know I will turn up, any of me."

"I will," she promises. "But maybe I will be the one to find you next time, Doctor."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1. For anyone who doesn't know, the "picnic in Asgard" that was originally imagined with Ten, was written with Eleven in _The Legends of River Song_ and one of the main themes on it is River trying and failing to ask him if he wants to form a family with her. The whole story is between hilarious and sad because River is always about to ask him until something interrupts her, but also because that is a quite young River that still believes they maybe can have children together. Opposed to the older River of _Five Twenty-Nine_ that says that she wouldn't have the time, because she is only encountering quite young incarnations at that point.[return to text]
> 
> So... Well, I waited long to write this chapter, it was definitely one of the many things I wanted to rewrite, _many_ things. I hope you liked it and I'm sorry if you like THORS and maybe you didn't but well... I kind of warned. I wish it had just being a boring episode without Darillium, maybe I could have stomached it better, even when it repeatedly shits on Eleven, throws Clara under the bus and literally offer zero character development for River. But nah, they had to put Darillium in it.
> 
> But in a way, I think it's kind of funny that for an episode that spends half of its runtime shitting on the Eleventh Doctor, his presence it's so strong in the episode that it even makes whatever they were trying to do with poor Twelve even more awkward. River's conflict in that episode it's with Eleven, since she doesn't know who Twelve is, spends half of it calling him boring, and she only just starts actually paying attention to him when he reveals himself. Eleven could have been there and he and River would have been passionately angry arguing or snogging each other and nothing of the dynamic between Twelve and River would change, poor dear would just be awkwardly standing there. LOL.
> 
> [BTS/glorified author's note.](https://ambitious-witch.tumblr.com/post/189151554703/from-silence-to-melody-bts)
> 
> Please, guys, remember to vote which story will you like me to write next in the poll, the link it's in the endnotes as always.
> 
> Comments are quite appreciated.


	7. A Broken Heart Or Not Heart At All

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> ‘Tell you what else is a good idea.’ She carried on soldering, didn’t look up. ‘Don’t. Don’t ever count how many children were on Gallifrey that day. And if you’ve already counted, do your very best to forget about it.’
> 
> ‘Why?’
> 
> ‘Because you live in a time machine. All of history is still happening outside those doors. On a good night, that means everyone you ever met is still alive and you can’t wait to see them again. On a bad night, it means everyone’s dead, and  
> you want to charge around the universe, pretending you can do something about that.’ She looked up at me. ‘I know which version of you I prefer.’
> 
> And there she was, so alive again. I remembered her, twisted, burnt and dead, in the depths of The Library. ‘What if there are people who died because of me?’ I asked. ‘What if there are people I should have saved?’
> 
> \- The Eleventh Doctor and River in _The Day of the Doctor_ novelization.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wow, I see that the two previous chapters weren't quite liked, were they? XD
> 
> Welp! I did warn you, here is another anyway! This chapter is the reason why that non-linear narrative tag exists.
> 
>  **Music for this chapter:** [_Frailty of Love_](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SUau3QAfDBo) from _Ophelia._
> 
> Thanks to my beta, Whovianlord.

He has given up on reaching the screwdriver when Mister Lux finally goes down and finds him. The poor man comes laughing and running, but the Doctor can’t find the strength to force his eyes away from staring at the chair.

“Doctor! Doctor, you did it! You did it, they are back! Everyone is…”

Strackman Lux stops mid-sentence, all joy gone from his face when The Doctor turns around.

“Pro - Professor Song?” He murmurs. “But-but how? What ha—?”

“She saved them,” the Doctor says hoarsely. “Help me out of here, Lux. We need to get her out of that horrible thing.” The man seems to barely notice him, his eyes are fixed on River Song’s body. “Lux!”

“Yes, yes, of course.”

There is a scream somewhere in the Doctor’s throat, but he doesn’t let it come out. Not when he is finally free from the handcuffs or when he takes her fragile, burnt-out body in his arms. They ask for help and put her body over a table, people gasp and some scream at the vision, but Lux tells them to back off. The Doctor tries to not shake when he puts her hands over her chest and then uses the sheet that they give him to cover her body.

She had been such a strong, vivacious woman since the first moment she took off her helmet. Infuriating, yes, that too. But remarkable, absolutely singular.

And this is what is left of her now. The ponytail that had held her curls is almost consumed, the suit had fused with her body to a point where it can’t be certain where it ends and she begins. And her face…

He can’t look at her face again, but he knows that her eyes were closed then, still are, like she had gone to sleep.

Only that she didn’t. She had screamed and screamed and he couldn’t—

Why?

Why did she do that? Stupid, stubborn woman. How come she believed that she had enough power to do that? He has lived nine hundred years for Rassilon’s sake! He had enough memory and the regeneration would hold on. What was that human thinking?!

“Why?” he mutters low enough for anyone to hear. “Why did you do that? Why were you so certain - why?”

He takes a deep breath, pinching the bridge of his nose, resting his body on one of the walls. She was a stranger, another of the number of many strangers that died during one of his adventures. Catastrophes happen, monsters happen, he fails, people die. He can’t let this get him down now, he has to find Donna.

A strangled sound comes from his throat. Not a sob, he swallows that like the worst poison and starts walking away from the room. River Song’s sad, tear stricken face still in his mind and her screams ringing in his ears.

 _Donna,_ the Doctor scolds himself. _Go and find Donna._

He can’t grieve now, he can’t let himself be paralyzed by it, he has things to do.

And anyway, he is sure that whatever rage and confusion he feels now, it will eventually turn into grief anyway. In the future, that future she is part of.

* * *

“Sweetie?” The Doctor yelps awake at River’s voice, warm and very much alive. Except she isn’t, is she?

He sits up on the bed and gets his fringe out of his eyes, blinking as his eyes get used to the light. For a moment he remembers seeing everything with another’s eyes, his too, but also different. When was the last time he had remembered that day so vividly? Quite a few decades ago. But River being here… he lets out a sigh.

River is here, in the TARDIS, in their bed, looking at him with her usual, loving concern. She is here and she shouldn’t be, because two weeks ago he had said goodbye to her after taking her to Darillium. But this younger version had sent a message and even against his best senses and the feeling that finding her again could break the rules of time, he had gone to find her. Of course, he had because he would never learn his lesson. No matter how much he wanted to run from her, he always ended up running _to_ her.

And she is young still, even when she is already a Professor.

That makes looking at her even harder.

“You okay?” She asks resting her chin on his shoulder, the Doctor nods, passing a hand over his face.

“Just a nightmare.” _Or my lack of control over my own memories._

“Seem to be a common theme this week,” River says and pushes him back in the bed. The Doctor knows he is not going back to sleep after that, even if he has the certainty that he doesn’t speak while asleep like in his last body, he doesn’t want that image to come back to his head. Not while she is here.

How and why she is here is what he still can’t understand. But he doesn’t complain, he can’t, not without telling any spoilers. He will probably discover later whatever is granting him a gift or a cruel joke.

For now, The Doctor just holds her and pretends their real life is there, in their bed, in the depths of the TARDIS. He pretends that he hasn’t been running across the universe without rest over the last two weeks. He pretends that he didn’t send her to her death.

Then he will keep running, because he promised that, didn’t he? _Don’t be alone, Doctor._ Wasn’t that what Amy wrote on the last page? He can’t remember well.

A few weeks pass and then she is gone again. He takes her to her parents’ house, trying to not look at the place and the guilt it brings. The Doctor kisses his wife one last time — it may truly be the last time this time — and they tell each other their normal partings. It's not entirely a lie, after all, she will see him again.

He waits until the TARDIS’ door closes before closing his eyes. No more this time, he is quite sure, no more diaries or middle meetings. She had said Darillium was the oldest she had seen him, maybe this once never crossed her mind because she hadn’t known.

He can’t help but laugh at the irony, all those years, thinking that she will only see younger versions of him until the end. And in the end everything had been even more timey wimey than they had expected.

“Oh River,” The Doctor murmurs with a bitter smile. “We are an endless paradox, aren’t we?”

The TARDIS hums, though he doesn’t know if it is a sound of comforting or just irritation.

“Alright, I know, I hear you, I know we have to stay away from this date,” he sighs. The TARDIS’s distaste for fixed points is even greater than his own and Amy and Rory’s, in particular, seem to have left a nasty mark on her to the point she hates to be around the dates where the timelines can collide.

Indeed, he is feeling a little strange too, like a tickle on the back of his head. Like something is… missing. Missing? No, something he forgot. What did he forget now?

“So,” The Doctor says when they are back in the vortex, not bothering to hide the lack of enthusiasm on his own voice. “Where shall we go, dear? Hmm? Maybe we should go to London and see Vastra and Jenny like I said,” The TARDIS wheezes. “Yes, yes, I know it was a lie, but it was not a bad idea. They might need help for…”

It almost hurts when they hit him, like something small and sharp encrusting on the back of his skull.

Amy and Rory dying... but not jumping off a roof or back in 1938...

No, back in 1887.

 _No, no, that’s not right,_ he thinks as the images pass through his mind. _No, that’s not right how could they—?_

River giving him a bittersweet smile as she says ‘only one psychopath per TARDIS’.

No.

His hands cradling River’s head as he pours what is left of his regeneration energy into her. _Please, not now, it can’t be now. We were supposed to have more time._

“No.” The Doctor murmurs, gripping the ladders of the console. “No, that… that didn’t happen, that wasn’t…”

The Towers of Darillium and River.

_I’m pregnant._

_Are you sure?_

“No,” he croaks, his chest tightening with pain. “No, that — twice, how could it? How could it happen twice?”

The new memories keep flashing in his mind, new things that couldn’t be. Changes. Big changes that couldn’t be. No. That’s not right, they can be, but there is only one reason why they are now appearing.

_But maybe I will be the one to find you next time, Doctor._

_Oh, River. River, River._ The Doctor falls on his knees, covering his face with his hand. _What were you trying to do? What have you done?_

That is when new memories stop. _She knew then_ , he thinks, the TARDIS hums as if trying to comfort him. _She knew and she was trying to change things, trying to change it._ _She knew._ For a moment a wash of guilt tainted with an improvable bit of hope crosses his mind, but it goes as quickly as it comes.

Because the Library is still there in the back of his mind. Still unchanged, horrible and pulsing with all its force. The Doctor feels the same sense of doom, the same when he hears her goodbye after Darillium. Both times.

The past readjusting to the change, the timeline unchanged no matter what they could do. Finished since the first day he laid eyes on her.

He covers his face with his hand as his body shakes with a sob.

* * *

The Doctor barely notices when the TARDIS lands in Victorian London. He stays sat down in the floor of the console, not moving after he is out of tears; just repeating the memories in his mind again and again like records. He does not notice Vastra entering, nor the TARDIS letting her in until the Silurian woman kneels in front of him. _How could River know about Manhattan? Or the Library?_

“Doctor?” she puts a hand on his shoulder. “Are you alright? The TARDIS let me in.”

The Doctor blinks at her. “Sorry?”

“I am asking if you are alright, my friend, you’re white as a sheet.” Vastra talks slowly and the Doctor pulls himself up, his friend takes his bicep to help him. “Did something happen? Amy and Rory?”

“Dead,” The Doctor says plainly. _Just like River, like our…_ “Weeping Angels got them. It was my fault.”

“I’m so sorry,” Vastra says and the Doctor just nods. It surprises him how easily his Ponds’ deaths come from his mouth, but he doesn’t have to worry Vastra about something that he can barely get himself. Yes, best for her to believe that. “Is there anything we can do?”

“No!” The Doctor says louder than intended and Vastra arches a brow. “No, I’m fine. The TARDIS brought me here by mistake, I was heading to another place. Nothing to worry about.”

Vastra doesn’t buy the lie, obviously, unlike with his companions, with her, it is difficult to play a role. She has known him far longer. But anyway, she still indulges him and nods, her bright blue eyes narrowed.

“Alright,” she says, “if you say so, but remember we’re always here for anything you need.”

He waits after she leaves to start going around the console, there is no twirling or running around it, just harsh precision. The TARDIS wheezes and _screams_ , not wanting to take off from the vortex.

“Come on, what’s the matter with you, Old Girl?” The console sparks and The Doctor pulls away. “I know this is not what we normally do, but _this,_ this isn’t a normal situation. So, please, work with me.”

The TARDIS hums angry, the Cloister Bell resonates in the console loud enough to make his ears buzz. “That’s enough!” he screams. “You won’t stop this, I’m not letting her die there again. If she was trying to change it, that means she knew there was a way out. That it can be…”

“No, it can’t,” a voice says behind him and the Doctor freezes. It takes him a few seconds to recognize it, a voice he hasn’t heard in centuries and never thought he would hear again. “But again, you always treat the impossible as what you _shouldn’t_ instead of what you _can’t_ , don’t you, Thief?”

The Doctor knows it’s the TARDIS who is speaking. Or more precise, the TARDIS interface. But the face that is staring at him blankly is Charlotte Pollard’s, looking just like the last time he had seen her, four lifetimes ago.[1]

“Stop this,” he hisses. “Stop this now, Sexy, it’s not funny.”

“You hate to be reminded of your worst mistakes, don’t you?” she says and Charley’s voice is cold and mechanic like the interface always is.

“Saving her was never a mistake,” the Doctor glares at her.

“Oh, no, it was a sacrifice.” The voice interface gives him a mechanic smile. “That’s what you called it, didn’t you? Back then, when the girl followed you and you were furious with her. It was a sacrifice, in which you sacrificed both of us in the name of _love.”_ [2]

“Stop it.”

“I’m not letting you do that again, Doctor,” the TARDIS continues mercilessly. “You’re walking straight into a universe-ending paradox. One even worse than Lake Silencio and you want me to take you there and perish with you again.”

“River knew what would happen, Sexy,” the Doctor whispers. “Somehow she knew and somehow she was changing things! If she could change what happened in Manhattan…”

“But she didn’t really change that happened, did she? The Orange One and the Pretty One were still taken by the angels. Years earlier but it was the same destiny. Fixed points can’t be rewritten, you just don’t know what you actually did in the first place.”

“You don’t have to give me a lesson on fixed points, Old Girl,” the Doctor snaps. “And you certainly don’t have to use one of my friend’s form to make a point. But if River had a way to avoid what happened…”

“If she had a way, she failed because it was fixed,” the TARDIS cuts him off. “There is no record in history that you can avoid with some tricks. No previous foreknowledge that you could have faked. _You_ were there, _you_ watched her die.”

“You think I don’t know that?!” He shouts, towering over the projection’s small stature. The TARDIS holds his gaze coldly and The Doctor takes a step back covering his face with his hands. “I have known that for four centuries, but I always thought, in the beginning, that I could do something, that there could be _something…”_

“Your timelines are intertwined, Thief,” the TARDIS says more gently. “She is all around you, more than you can remember. Even before the moment, you started taking humans with you and your granddaughter.[3]

And all of that started with her death, without it, she wouldn’t have existed in the first place.”

“Then if it’s so impossible, why did she decide to start trying so late in the line?” The Doctor asks gritting his teeth. “Hmm? Why? All these memories, Old Girl: Manhattan, the Rain Gods Planet, Darillium. I lived them all twice, all because she was trying to do what I didn’t have the damn guts to do.”

“Potentially killing me and yourself by trying to rewrite a fixed point is not having ‘guts’, Doctor, it’s just being desperate. And you’re not stopping, _I_ am stopping you.”

The Doctor turns around and rests his weight over the console, clenching his hands on the ladders.

“I’m not heartless,” the TARDIS says, obviously hearing his thoughts through their link. “But I don’t consider it an insult since that’s a human concept of sentiment. Tell me, Thief: Did you feel insulted when your little Charley Pollard called you that?”

 _Better a broken heart, than no heart at all._ He had said that to Kazran once, even further back he hadn't felt anything when Charley had said he was heartless. For him, C'rizz’s death had been something that they had to honour by moving on or that was he had told himself to justify his behaviour at her hurt feelings.[4]

The truth is that the places are switched now and the Doctor is the one who feels the resentment growing deep in his hearts. The TARDIS has been his friend, most loyal companion since he got out of Gallifrey and the link between them is not only telepathic but he has loved her. As bizarre and sentimental that would sound for any other Time Lord.

"She is your daughter.” The Doctor turns around his jaw tense. “Does that mean anything to you?”

It’s a cruel question, he knows it, but maybe he wants to hurt her, maybe he wants her to feel like he does. He doesn’t want River to be just a number, a page in a book, a fixed point that was left to happen because she was too dangerous and not because she was wanted.

"She is," the TARDIS says finally, "and she is alive for me. And dead. All at once. I don't feel time like you more than you do it like humans. I knew where she would go, I always knew and now it's over.

"You thought you could take me again and throw me to a giant paradox in the name of love again? My love for her? For you? Oh, Thief, you have spent too much time with humans. You are feeling too much like them. Before this, you would have grieved and moved on. Find another companion, and after that do the same."

"This is not the same!" he spats. "You say it like it so easy, you don't feel the time like me, you don't feel the weight of the years or the losses. You don't know what is to be this old. Moving on and on and for what?! To go around in a never-ending circle so I lose a part of myself with every single one of them.”

Sexy doesn’t make any reaction at his words and even if she could show many, he doubts it would be different. She knows him too well.

And he knows she is right, the universe will end if he tries to change the Library, that if he doesn’t die eaten by the Vashta Nerada first, or causes an even bigger mess than ends up erasing himself too if River’s timeline is as intertwined with his as the TARDIS says.

He knows she is right, but that doesn’t make it hurt less. It doesn’t make the fact that River was battling against time when he had already given up to it less hard. It doesn’t delete the fact she was…

The Doctor looks at the interface, through her, far away in time or just weeks to him in those two different nights in the Singing Towers.

No, it hurts all the same.

“Take me to London, then,” he says coolly and the TARDIS narrows the eyes of her stolen face. “Go ahead, if you won’t let me drive.”

While she goes back to Victorian England, the Doctor starts walking away from the console and to the room that he and River have used since their wedding. The only room he has used to sleep, truly, since before that he just slept in the console room while Amy and Rory were on their own.

He takes the key and locks the door, throwing the key to the supernova once he passes close.

The TARDIS’s interface follows him around, still talking.

“What are you doing exactly?”

“I’m going to stop.”

“What?”

“You say I can’t save her and I have to go on,” he hisses. “Well, maybe I don’t want to go on. Maybe it’s time to stop. For real, this time. Everybody has to retire someday.”

“That is absurd.”

The Doctor ignores her as he goes to the wardrobe, where he ditches his purple coat and puts on period-appropriate ones. When he is about to pick a bowtie out of pure habit, he grimaces and takes a normal one.

“This is my last life,” he says softly, “my last life and what have I done with it? Just having a couple of companions whose lives I ruined and sending the most miraculous, magnificent woman I’ve ever met to a horrible death. It’s done, I’m done with it. I have had _enough._ ”

"You think you can experience things like them?” the TARDIS says. "You think you can act like a normal man and stop because the pain is too much? You can't. You're not normal. You're the Doctor."

"Not anymore."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1. For people that don't listen Big Finish, Charlotte Pollard was one of the Eighth Doctor's companions and probably the first companion being written with a explicit romantic attachment to him [meaning: mentioning actual romantic feelings, the L word and all, as opposed to Jo and Sarah who were later vindicated by Modern Who].They had an arc that one could call a deconstruction of the Rescue Romance trope and that I would call both painful and frustrating because they deserved a better finale for that arc than _The Next Life._ [return to text]
> 
> 2.At the end of the episode _Nerverland_ in Big Finish, the Eighth Doctor sacrificed himself to save Charley since she was a paradox because he took her away and from the moment she would have died and she became a link between two universes. The TARDIS spends a good chunk of the next four-hours-long episode, _Zagreus_ calling out Eight on sacrificing _her_ along with himself to save Charley, as well as his romantic feelings for the girl. Things that Eight responds with denial. Until _Scherzo_ where he actually admits his feelings for her after some weeks of sensory deprivation and good old fashioned despair... To then go back into denial in later episodes until Charley's departure.[return to text]
> 
> Also, fun fact! I have been discussed that apparently (I honestly hope it's not true) _Scherzo_ was the reason behind the stupid I Love You Stigma in the show. Because at the beginning of the audio drama Charley says to the Doctor to never say _I love you_ again (because he implied that he didn't when he told her in _Neverland_ ) if he didn't mean it... But the Doctor says it again, or more like, yells it very angry to her, about thirty minutes later. He also recognizes that he loves her as a realization at the end of the episode, quite a while after that supposed prohibition is outed.
> 
> So, basically we have that stupid trope in the show because RTD didn't finish to listen to the whole episode... And Moff kept the stupid trope for some fucking reason. One of the most dramatic confessions of love in the whole history of _Doctor Who_ and someone went and thought: "Oh, yeah, this means that the Doctor can't ever say 'I love you' ever again." Jesus Christ XD
> 
> 3.River met the First Doctor before her took his first companions during the episode of _The Diary of River Song,_ _An Unearthly Woman._ [return to text]
> 
> 4.C'rizz was the Eighth Doctor's companion along with Charley.[return to text]
> 
> Alright! This is all for now, this chapter had to be divided into two because it was getting too long, so the next chapter will also be in Eleven's POV. Comments are appreciated.
> 
> [BTS/glorified author's note.](https://ambitious-witch.tumblr.com/post/189478880258/from-silence-to-melody-bts)


	8. Echo

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Many times he had stepped out from the time machine feeling that he could do more, see more. That the universe was still beautiful and dangerous and there was much to do yet.
> 
> Now, he only sees grey; a universe that cares so little and has paid for his help with corpses.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, new chapter, I'm sorry for disappearing for so long, people. There was a new Star Wars movie and it was... terrible. So I stayed in the fandom for a time, everyone is sad and angry, including me, so I had a hard time getting with this chapter. Plus, I didn't like the latest series of The Diary of River Song, so that added to my bad mood.
> 
> But I'm determined to finish this story! So, after weeks and some Bon Jovi CDs, here is the new chapter, I hope you enjoy it and welcome to the new readers.

After the Time War had ended, the Doctor had considered retiring… for about twenty minutes. Even with the knowledge that he had destroyed his own world, that hadn’t stopped him interfering. The guilt had been too much to bear and he had thought that saving more lives would make up for all the ones he had taken. Pay the universe back, he hadn’t got to choose to stop or die because he had lived.

He had spent a lot of time, two lives precisely, trying to be a hero again. It was only when he had regenerated in his thir— _eleventh_ face that he had realised that being a hero had just hurt the people around him.

So, he had gone around with the Ponds. All he had wanted then was to travel around, to explore, to see the universe through Amy's bright, impressed eyes, instead of his own weary ones. To be wanted, because his previous self had made it quite clear that he hadn't been.

River had broken the illusion of that easy life. She broke out just like she had in his previous one and gone with the same air.

The Doctor parks in, but more specifically above, Victorian England, exiting the TARDIS and making sure he is hidden by the cloud he is on.

Many times he had stepped out from the time machine feeling that he could do more, see more. That the universe was still beautiful and dangerous and there was much to do yet.

Now, he only sees grey; a universe that cares so little and has paid for his help with corpses.

* * *

The Doctor doesn’t visit the Paternoster Gang at first; indeed, he doesn’t leave his cloud until a month after his arrival, when he hears someone knocking at the door.

“Doctor?” Jenny Flint’s voice comes from the other side of the door. “Doctor is that you?”

 _How the hell did she get here?_ The Doctor thinks and the TARDIS immediately responds with a hum. He rolls his eyes. Of course, she did that.

He sighs, putting his book down. If it was Strax he would probably ignore it because the Sontaran would get bored of insisting after time and just threaten with grenades. But this is kind, incredibly persistent Jenny Flint. She certainly will be there for quite a long time.

“Yes?” He asks when he gets to the door. “Oh, hello Jenny, sorry, I was asleep.” The lie certainly comes easier than his poor attempt of a smile.

“We weren’t expecting you, Doctor,” Jenny says. “But I swore that I heard the TARDIS engines the other day and— Why… Why is the TARDIS in a cloud?”

“Camouflage to not attract humans,” the Doctor says nonchalantly.

"Are you investigating something?" The young woman asks. "Is some alien force here? I'm sure my wife would want to know."

"No." The Doctor sighs, pinching the bridge of his nose. "No there is nothing to investigate, Jenny. I'm just… Staying, for a while. That's all."

"Oh." Jenny frowns, confused. The Doctor can't blame her. Some months ago he would have had the same reaction upon hearing that he would stay in one place for long.

But where else can he run now?

"Is there anything I can help you with, Jenny?" The Doctor asks after an awkward silence.

"Uh… No, I—"

"Alright," the Doctor quips, not letting her finish. "Good afternoon, then."

He closes the door before Jenny can say anything more.

Vastra is the next to come. She is, of course, more direct than her wife. And the TARDIS lets her in immediately, despite the Doctor’s objections.

“Jenny says you’re staying here,” she says as a greeting. The Doctor has changed his accommodation from the console room to the Library, so at least he can pretend the door is too far away when they knock.

The Doctor pretends he didn’t hear her for a moment, writing on River’s typewriter. He hears the steps of the Silurian woman across the room until she stops close to his table.

“Have you been drinking?” The Doctor frowns and looks up at Vastra holding the half-full brandy bottle that is on the table.

“Do I look like I have been?” The Doctor asks, deadpan. Vastra narrows her eyes.

“If I can be honest, my friend, you look like rubbish.” She sits down, facing him. “And you’re being rude.”

The Doctor sighs, taking his glasses off. “You’re right, I’m sorry. And to answer your question: no, I haven’t. This body doesn’t tolerate alcohol at all.”[1]

“Well, that’s not exactly a bad change from the last one,” Vastra shrugs. “What are you writing so diligently?”

“A book.”

“About?”

“ _The History Of The Last Great Time War.”_ The title is rubbish and the Doctor knows it, but it’s not like anyone will read it.[2]

“A history book?” The Silurian asks and the Doctor nods, putting his glasses back. “Wouldn’t you need to write it by hand? That type machine is not from this era.”

“I’m not going to publish it,” the Doctor says, frowning. “It will stay here, safe. Nobody has an exact idea of what the Time War was. No need to open those fantastic horrors to the universe now. I doubt they will be understood.”

“Then why write it?”

“To forget.” The Doctor manages to force a smile this time. He really does many things to keep himself busy, including toying around with the memory worm that is in one of the gardens. He has been thinking about how much of a relief it would be: sleeping without nightmares. Even when he knows that whatever thing he forgets would be replaced by another. Some deaths by others, the Time War with Manhattan, Manhattan with the Library.

That’s why he is writing, in case he just chooses to do it and the need to remember things comes back.

“When was the last time you slept?”

Or maybe he just wants to keep himself awake. There can be a lot of reasons.

“I don’t need much sleep. I had a catnap on the couch,” Vastra narrows her eyes. “I’m fine,” he insists.

“Why are you staying here, Doctor? Truly? You hate Victorian London.”

“No, I don’t!”

“Yes, you do,” Vastra says. “You only come when there is trouble or when you brought Professor Song to…”

The Silurian stops abruptly and the Doctor tenses.

“Doctor,” she starts softly. “It wasn’t just Amy and Rory, was it?”

The Doctor clenches his jaw and keeps his eyes on the type machine. “It was always going to happen. They all do it eventually. They all die.”

“What happened? The Angels?”

“Doesn’t matter what happened.” River had said that the first time, hadn’t she? And he had been furious at her in that version of the timeline. Furious because she wouldn’t open up. “It had to happen, Vastra, just like with Demons’ Run. There are things that I can’t change.” _Because she tried and died anyway._

Vastra stays silent for a few minutes but then gets up and sighs. “You know that I don’t approve of what you’re doing.”

“I know.”

“But I cannot force you to do anything,” Vastra puts a hand over his shoulder. “We’ll be here for you when you decide to come out.”

The Doctor nods, he knows they will. They always are.

They truly deserve better than him.

* * *

When he feels her appear for the first time, the Doctor accepts that he has finally gone mad.

It was a matter of time after all, wasn’t it? He has spent two years alone after all. Two years walking around the infinity space of the TARDIS, just getting out to show the Gang that he is still alive. Hallucinations are not strange for him, nor are daydreams.

Like some kind of irony, he is the library when it happens.

“I thought you couldn’t bear being in a single place for so long.”

It feels like every muscle on his body has become stone, he doesn’t move, he doesn’t even breathe, but he is sure that’s her voice.

“What’s wrong, sweetie? Are you truly surprised that I’m here?” Her voice is low, sharp like a knife. “Or did you really believe that I was going to stay in the Library for all eternity?”

The Doctor doesn’t move, his hearts beating fast to the point of being painful; he closes his eyes. _She is not real, she is not real._

“Doctor?”

 _Stop this,_ he tells himself. _Stop this, she is gone, she’s never coming back._

“It took me a long time to figure out how to get here,” she continues, “and if I’m connected to her, that means that you…”

Her voluminous curls are suddenly on sight and she is hovering over him. The Doctor looks at her without looking, his eyes refusing to focus even when he swears that he can _feel_ her breath on her face. _I’m exhausted, I haven’t slept since… quite a long time._

“This is not right.” River walks around his desk and waves her hand over his face. The Doctor keeps still, his eyes back on the book. “Can you even hear me?”

 _She will go,_ he thinks as the silence fills the place like a poison. _If I respond to this, it will last longer. She will disappear if I keep my mind occupied._

And he really tries to, he reads the book slowly, even for humans. He plays every word in his head to avoid lifting his eyes and find her in front of him. History of a planet that he will never see again.

“This can’t be,” her voice breaks the silence after a few minutes. Now it sounds hurt rather than angry. “This can’t be, you’re supposed to see me. It — It has to be a mistake. I’ll be right back.”

The Doctor waits almost half an hour to take his eyes off the book again and lets out a long sigh when he sees nothing. The exhaustion hits like a ton of bricks over his back as he pitches his eyes and rests his head over his arms to sleep.

The second time is when it really hits him, or, more correctly, it’s when she does.

Her anger doesn’t surprise him, of course, she is angry. He killed her, didn’t he?

“CAL told me that everything is correct and that I’m quite rightly connected to the matrix,” she says as soon as she appears in the console room. “So unless you have broken your psychic link to her, you can see me too.”

 _CAL?_ The Doctor’s hand start shaking over the console. _No, no, you can’t be here. Please._

“She can hear me,” River says walking to him. “She knows I am here so you must know too. Stop _playing_ , Doctor.”

She shouldn’t be here, she should have forgotten him. Why? Why is she here?

“Look at me.” She bites out, furious. “I know, you can hear me, you must hear me. Turn around and look at me, Doctor.”

He does turn around, his limbs moving automatically, like a robot.

But his eyes are still glazed, not falling on her for a single second. He can’t do, if he does that means...

Something cold touches his cheek and his eyes meet hers for a second. Green-gold and furious, not a single spot different than when he had seen her for the first time. The Doctor realizes a little late that she just slapped him.

River’s face turns from fury to sadness as she notices that her hand went through his face and the Doctor uses her shock to escape. He can’t do this, not now; and to his surprise, the ghost doesn’t follow him.

The Doctor stumbles into a room and falls on his knees, a sob breaking through him as he covers his face with his hands. He realises that he had held a little hope, a stupid, reckless desire that she had got away, that she had changed the future. Even with the TARDIS’ warnings, it had been there. But now she is here, dead, and everything is sealed in stone.

She is in the Library, she is a data ghost in the Library’s database. Did she truly change all those things just to die anyway? Why didn’t she throw away the screwdriver? Didn’t the spoilers say to never touch that?

The Doctor wants to ask her how she did it. He wants to ask why when he still remembers her saying to not change one line. He wants to ask about their child.

A hysterical laugh bursts out of him. He can't, he can’t talk to her, he can't even acknowledge she is there.

Because if he does it will hurt too much. Enough to kill whatever is left of the Doctor. Enough to make the Time Lord Victorious seem like a harmless child. Because nothing would stop him, not until she is by his side again. Timelines, the future and the entire universe be damned.

“Don’t.” The TARDIS’ voice interface appears in front of him. “I know what you’re thinking. Don’t.”

“She is here,” the Doctor chokes out. “After everything that happened, she is here.”

“She won’t stay long, Thief.” The Doctor shakes his head but she doesn’t stop. “This is just proof that you can’t change anything. You have seen her like this already, you can’t go back.”

“You did this!” The Doctor snaps at her, but her stolen face remains inexpressive. “You brought her here because you thought I had ho…”

“I didn’t do anything, she did,” the TARDIS says. “And yes, now it’s too late. Trying to do anything would cause an even bigger paradox.”

The Doctor takes a deep breath, he wants to scream at her, he wants to find a way to change it, to stop this.

But he can’t, even if River tried to change it, she is here now, it’s truly sealed. He clenches his jaw, wishing to never have made that bloody screwdriver, cursing his previous self and his need of hope, his weakness.

He starts going out again after that; if River is connected to the TARDIS, then he tries to put the biggest distance between him and the time machine. The Gang intercepts him many times, trying to get him to investigate anomalies and mysteries. The Doctor shrugs them away, always, repeating over and over that he doesn’t do that anymore.

He could, of course, even going by foot. Cases would make him stay away from the TARDIS. But he doesn’t really trust his own self-control. If something happens and he ends up with his hand on the console again, what would stop him to try and change everything? Well, the TARDIS would, of course, but she is not the only time machine in the universe.

The Doctor plays these ideas in his head, as he did from the first moment he walked out of the Library with Donna. They are all useless, impossible.

She is there when he returns to the TARDIS, always waiting, always furious, sarcastic and demanding answers, demanding to be seen. The Doctor listens to every single one of them, but he can’t give her what she wants. Not when he himself is a ghost too.

* * *

“One of my friends faded,” she says one day. They are in the library again, his back turned at her. “Dave. He was in the gardens of the Institute and… he just smiled at me and faded.”

The Doctor doesn’t make sound, his head buried in the pages of his diary.

“Charlotte says that he was at peace,” River lets out a choked laugh. “And I know that you know? I know he was. He told me he sent a conference call to his family and that they were okay. He forgot them first, and then he remembered and then he faded.”

There is a long silence after that, so long that the Doctor thinks she has gone. But when he is about to turn around, her voice breaks again.

“I hate you.” The Doctor keeps still with every syllable, almost stopping his breath. “I never thought I could hate you again, you know? With everything that Kovarian did to me. Loving you was my rebellion against them.

“But now? What are we now, Doctor? You can’t hear me. I won’t leave. I’m a ghost and you’re my jailer in this existence. I won’t leave without a goodbye and you won’t talk to me and I _hate_ you for that!”

Her voice feels closer or maybe is that she is nearly screaming. The Doctor would swear he can hear her sobbing. His hand grips the pen and he tries to calm the thundering of his hearts.

“Are we making competition for who is the one that would fade first?” She spits. “I fade away or you lock yourself away until you die, that’s the damn deal?! Are you really going to waste yourself away because of what happened to my parents? How many of them were there, Doctor? My parents weren’t your only companions and they certainly went out better than others.”

 _It’s not for them,_ the Doctor thinks but doesn’t lower any shields in his mind. She can’t hear him, if she hears him, she will find out. _It doesn’t have to do with them._

“Why did you give me that screwdriver?” Her voice sounds small and tired. “Why do it? Why give me no choice but _this?_ ”

 _I had no choice,_ he grits his teeth. _It was fixed. You fixed it._

“Was it revenge?”

_You knocked me out._

“Doctor.”

_You handcuffed me to that machine._

“Answer me!”

 _You told me about Darillium, you put both us in a fixed time. I had many choices, watching you die was not one of them._ The words go fast in his mind as he tries to keep his mouth shut to not scream them to her. But River keeps shouting and he keeps his silence.

“Why can’t you just listen to me?!” He feels something cold down his spine, is she hitting his back? He feels her close again, behind him, as if her head is resting on his shoulder blade.

“I hate you.” River whispers and the Doctor closes his eyes, letting the tears that had been gathering go down his face.

_No, you don’t._

* * *

Echo.

That’s quite a word for something that is flitting, that is not entirely there. That will fade with time, like everything.

The Doctor thinks that he has become that with time, a ghost of a man with an invisible wife.

She comes back many times, to scream at him, to tell him to get out, to just be there as a silent presence. One day she comes and cries and doesn’t return.

“You should talk to her,” Vastra says one day that they are playing chess together in the TARDIS. “She has been helping us with some cases and we told her about you.”

“Why I am not surprised about that?” He mutters moving his piece. “I can’t talk to her, Vastra. And even if I did, this would be between us.”

Vastra hums. “She did say you don’t like endings.”

The Doctor lets out a humourless laugh. “Of course she said that.”

He is not a stranger to endings, he has had his fair amount of them. The Doctor has never been that naive, he knows that everything dies. That everything ends, otherwise, nothing would get started.

River had told him that once: about his good days and bad days. How he could travel and visit the people that he had lost because he had a time machine.

But no, it’s not the same, it could be with Mickey and Martha, with Sarah Jane and Jo, with the companions that went away or he had to leave behind instead of being snatched out abruptly from his life.

But River is different, just like with Charley, with Rose, with Donna; with Amy and Rory, it is permanent. It has no escape because their end had been their beginning, a beginning full of death.

And this is his last life. Maybe that’s why it feels so permanent; he had hoped that their ends and his would be closer.

But here he is, with centuries to go, walking around London. Will he live here long enough to see his previous selves running around unaware about the future?

No, he really won’t.

Because a year later he meets Clara.

* * *

“Doctor?” A smile grows on his face when Clara enters the TARDIS. He left the girl at home the night before, but for her, it must have been some weeks. She deserved the rest, he thought. It’s the least she deserves after what she did.

And maybe he needs a break too, after what happened in Trenzalore.

 _Shut it,_ he tells himself. _She is at peace now. She moved on and so should you, for both your sakes._

“I’ll be with you in a moment, Clara!” The Doctor takes his goggles off and pops his head out of the console’s box. “Well, how was the week? What— What’s wrong?”

Clara looks pale and drained in front of him, just like when he had left her after they got out from his timestream. Had he picked the wrong date?

“Doctor,” Clara mutters, “remember what you told me about my echoes? That some of the memories could stick around because I crossed your timestream?”

“Yes.” Clara covers her mouth with her hands. “Clara, what’s wrong?”

“Your wife.”

“What about her?”

“She is alive,” the girl says, her enormous eyes looking at something far away from him. The Doctor takes a step back, covering his face with his hands. “I saw her, Doctor. I — no... _She_ saved her. The girl. The little girl that came before Oswin. She was there in the Library and…”

“Clara.”

“... River was going to go but she stopped her.”

“Clara.”

“Doctor, she is alive, she is around in the past. You have to find— ”

“Clara!” The Doctor raises his voice. “Stop, just stop, for a second. Are you saying that Charlotte Lux was one of your echoes?”

“Yes,” Clara says. “It didn’t feel like a dream, Doctor. It was too real to be one.”

The Doctor sighs, squeezing the bridge of his nose and rests his weight on the rail of the console room.

“So it was you.” He chuckles softly. “Of course the Impossible Girl would do something like that.”

“You knew,” Clara says, “but how could you? You told me she was dead in Trenzalore if you knew that Charlotte saved her…”

“She was dead,” the Doctor says. “She is.”

“I don’t understand, I saw her get out, she…”

“She _tried_ to change it, Clara,” the Doctor sighs. “It didn’t work, the Library went as it did originally. That’s why we saw her data ghost, it’s all a circle; fixed in time.”

Every word feels rehearsed, maybe they are. He has been telling himself that for decades.

“I’m sorry,” Clara says after a moment, her big eyes full of tears. The Doctor shakes his head and takes her in his arms, pressing a kiss against her hair.

“It’s alright, it wasn’t your fault.”

He doesn’t lie, he can’t be angry at her; not even at Charlotte, for technically giving River false hope. There are memories of that different timeline that he will always cherish; things that he is glad that River changed. They got more time together, they got the idea of a child, even if it was for a second. That was a lot more than he ever hoped for.

“Come now,” he says as they separate. “You should go and change. I was going to ask you if you wanted to see Jane again, but now I see it’s obligatory to lift your spirits up.”

“Jane? Jane Austen? Are you sure?” Clara doesn’t go red like the many times she asked to visit the author, her face still marked with concern.

“Yes! I’m sure.” The Doctor launches himself over the console and starts pressing coordinates. “C’mon, chop, chop! You can’t go to Regency England with those clothes. Jane ran out of excuses the last time. Go!”

The Doctor sighs after his companion disappears in the corridors. He closes his eyes for a moment and starts changing the coordinates for Luna University. The TARDIS hums angrily.

“Oh, shut it,” he spits at her. “I don’t want to hear anything from you now. It will be just a moment. And take care of Clara. She saved your daughter for Thalia’s sake.”

He had visited Luna a few times, mostly when River was young and he was on his farewell tour; already too in love with her and convinced he was going to die to stay properly away. The place has changed little at the moment he lands, exactly a month after what had happened in the Library. The Doctor goes around the place, ending up in one of the halls where he remembers River giving lectures about the myth of his people.

“Sir?” A young woman’s voice startles him and he turns around, but when he does her expression is surprised. “I— Huh, I’m sorry. Can I help you?”

She looks as out of place as he does. Her clothes are too retro for the period and place. Well, she is an archaeologist. Maybe it’s just something they do.

“Yes,” the Doctor gives her a kind smile. “I was looking for an old friend of mine: Professor River Song, does she still work here?”

 _Oh, you’re pathetic, aren’t you?_ His own mind laughs.

“Professor Song? Yes, she was my… mentor,” the girl’s face grows sombre. “I’m sorry, sir, I’m afraid she passed away a few months ago.”

“Did she?” The Doctor’s voice sounds hollow and he shakes his head. Of course, she did. What was he thinking coming back here? That he would find her alive and well, just coming back and up for her next expedition? “I’m sorry, it was my mistake, thank you for your help Ms…?”

“Moll.”

“Moll.” The Doctor tries to smile and nods again. “I’m sorry for taking up your time.”

“Wait!” The girl says when he starts climbing the stairs, the Doctor turns around. “Are you the Doctor?”

“Yes?” Did River talk about him to her students… What is he thinking, of course, she did. He was part of her thesis after all.

“I’m sorry for your loss, then, sir,” Moll says. “We met, you know, I was accompanying Professor Song on one of her travels. You looked… quite different.”

The Doctor frowns for a moment, he can’t recall ever seeing this girl’s face. Though if it was a younger version that she encountered, River probably had a hand on that.

“Yeah, I tend to do that,” the Doctor tries to laugh but suddenly the girl’s arms are around him and he freezes. “Huh, Miss Moll…?”

“Oh, God, I’m sorry, I was just…” the girl’s pale face goes bright red. “I apologise, it has been hard without her. But I heard she died a heroine.”

“Yeah, she did.” the Doctor mutters and makes his way out. “A pleasure, Ms. Moll.”

“Till the next time, Doctor.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1. Previous incarnations of the Doctor tended to drink when grieving or depressed, in the Day of the Doctor novelization, Ten has actually a moment when he stays staring to a bottle of brady after seeing River just after the Library. Since we see Eleven spiting or not liking alcohol when offered, I always asumed he was intolerant to it.[return to text]
> 
> 2. The History of the Last Great Time War doesn't have an author in _Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS_ and also doubt that the Doctor woudl let anyone have his real name printed, so I'm assumed he wrote it.[return to text]
> 
> [BTS/glorified author's note.](https://ambitious-witch.tumblr.com/post/190450409138/from-silence-to-melody-bts)
> 
> Alright, people, it's all for today, thank you for your kind reviews, you make the experience of writing in a small fandom really worth it. Don't forget to vote for which story you want next in the link below. Till next time.

**Author's Note:**

> [Link to my blog if you have questions, requests or prompts.](https://ambitious-witch.tumblr.com/)
> 
> [Vote which story do you want me to write after finishing this one.](https://www.poll-maker.com/poll2613054xF1e449ce-75)


End file.
